Social Sciences Media Studies

More than a decade ago, counterterrorism expert Rita Katz began browsing white supremacist and neo-Nazi forums. The hateful rhetoric and constant threats of violence immediately reminded her of jihadist militants. Now, years of attacks committed by extremists radicalized online—including at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and mosques in New Zealand, as well as the Capitol siege—have brought home the danger. From ISIS to QAnon, Saints and Soldiers pinpoints the approaches needed for a new era in which arrests and military campaigns alone cannot stop never-before-seen threats.

As consumers of art, and especially as fans, we have a host of tricky moral question to navigate: do the moral lives of artists affect the aesthetic quality of their work? In Drawing the Line, Erich Hatala Matthes argues that it doesn't matter whether we can separate the art from the artist, because we shouldn't. Matthes argues both that the lives of artists can play an important role in shaping our moral and aesthetic relationship to the artworks that we love and that these same artworks offer us powerful resources for grappling with the immorality of their creators.

The internet was created on the basis that all users are equal, but children and the vulnerable are not. In Born Digital, Robert Wigley distils the mountains of available research on the subject and brings to bear his wealth of institutional experience to present a road map for society to radically and urgently reset its relationship with technology - for the sake of future generations.

This hybrid collection of short crónicas, journalism, and personal essays on systemic violence in contemporary Mexico and along the US-Mexico border draws together literary theory and historical analysis to outline how neoliberalism, corruption, and drug trafficking - culminating in the misnamed “war on drugs” - has shaped Mexico. Working from and against this political context, Cristina Rivera Garza posits that collective grief is an act of resistance against state violence and that writing is a powerful mode of seeking social justice and embodying resilience.

What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden age of Chinese science fiction.

Head down the rabbit hole and feed your fascination for conspiracy and controversy. Conspiracy theories—they're influential and spread to sometimes irrational extremes. Why do people cling to conspiracy theories so powerfully? Is there a way to separate the possible from the impossible? Yes. Enter: Debunked.

Since the dawn of communication, humankind has looked around itself and used myths and legends to make sense of the world. Gods, Heroes and Monsters invites you to take your place at the campfire that’s been glowing since the first tale was told. Discover the fascinating variety—and several surprising similarities—of the stories that have been shared for millennia, from one person to another, one lesson at a time. Ancient stories are retold under themes such as the beginning (and end) of the world, death, love, and monsters and spirits.

The millions of fans who watch World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) programs each year are well aware of their role in building the narrative of the sport. #WWE: Professional Wrestling in the Digital Age explores the intersections between media, technology, and fandom in WWE's contemporary programming and business practices. In the Reality Era of WWE (2011 to the present), wrestling narratives have increasingly drawn on real-life personalities and events that stretch beyond the story-world created and maintained by WWE.

Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement want to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media want a case to drag on as long as humanly possible and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama, drop by bloody drop, in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, and even then break them or find ways to work loopholes into them.

This book exposes how the media racializes and genderizes news coverage to fit the its far left "progressive" agenda-with bias baked into every aspect of news organizations these days. This work sets the record straight.

The future is an uncertain, uncomfortable prospect for employees, employers, and society at large. A flurry of unprecedented events have proven that, despite what some politicians and economists may tell us, the future is not set in stone. In light of this uncertainty, The Future Starts Now looks toward the various innovations and technologies that may shape our future. Authors Theo Priestley and Bronwyn Williams have brought together the world's leading futurists to articulate and clarify the current trajectories in technology, economics, politics, and business.

The 10 best Bond movies...ever? It doesn't get much more subjective than this. Or much more fun! Come and join international best-selling author Mark Williams on a personal James Bond odyssey as he explores the phenomenon that is James Bond, starting with the Bond film that made number 10 on the list: Thunderball.

Published in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising on June 28, 1969, Indecent Advances investigates how queer men navigated a society that criminalized them and displayed little compassion for the violence they endured. Polchin shows, with masterful insight, how this discrimination was ultimately transformed by activists to help shape the burgeoning gay rights movement in the years leading up to Stonewall.

In the era of Watergate and rising feminist awareness, reporter Pam Zekman was queen of the muckrakers. Her biggest investigation: buy a bar, document the inevitable city department shakedowns and bribes, and publicly document Chicago’s institutionalized corruption. Her epic story changed Chicago and also raised serious questions about the future of journalism.

Cold War Radio is a fascinating look at how the United States waged the Cold War through the international broadcasting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Mark G. Pomar takes listeners inside the two radio stations to show how the broadcasts were conceived and the impact they had on international broadcasting, United States-Soviet relations, Russian history, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

A Thousand Cuts is a candid exploration of one of America's strangest and most quickly vanishing subcultures. It is about the death of physical film in the digital era and about a paranoid, secretive, eccentric, and sometimes obsessive group of film-mad collectors who made movies and their projection a private religion in the time before DVDs and Blu-rays.

Alles über Battlestar Galactica: Wie sehr gleichen uns die Zylonen? Künstliche Lebensformen. Auf der Suche nach einer zweiten Erde. 10 Dinge, die man über Battlestar Galactica wissen sollte.

For centuries man has feared the bat. Its seeming ability to traverse between the world has inspired tales of terrible horror but also stories of great hope. This is the tale of the age-old Bat Man from Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s creation in 1939 to Dracula and even further back into time than most realize. Re-live the rise of the Batman era, from the very beginnings to the modern age and in so doing understand how this creation has taken on a life of its own.

A behind-the-scenes look at how conservatives - and even iconoclasts who don't consider themselves conservative - are overthrowing the liberal media and political correctness. From the bloggers who demolished Dan Rather, to the Swift Boat veterans who sank John Kerry, to the gleeful anti-political correctness of such comedic send-ups as South Park and Team America, the American media landscape has suffered an earthquake.

In The Visual Detox, art expert and businesswoman Marine Tanguy explains how the imagery we see shapes our wellbeing. She gives us new tools to think critically about images, combat information overload and participate more in the visual world around us by engaging with the art and content that improves our day-to-day experiences online, at work, in our homes and in public spaces.