Social Sciences Media Studies

Tackling the complex subject of bias head on, Skewed investigates the hidden messages we absorb from birth. Looking closely at what the research can tell us, Caryn Franklin and Dr Keon West explain how our inner worlds are shaped by false information, media trends, and the brain’s preference for patterns and stereotypes. Exploring biases around gender, sexuality, race, age and appearance, Caryn and Keon explain how bias impacts all of our lives.

In this raw and redemptive debut memoir, Ellen O'Connell Whittet explores the silent suffering of the ballerina - and finds it emblematic of the violence that women quietly shoulder every day. For O'Connell Whittet, letting go of one meant confronting the other - only then was it possible to truly take flight.

In this startling group memoir, four friends - Black and White, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born - use Toni Morrison’s novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance.

Trans woman and screenwriter Tilly Bridges takes you through the trans allegories of the Matrix franchise, with deep dives into The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Animatrix, The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix Resurrections, tracking one person’s transition journey—from Thomas Anderson, to Neo… to Trinity. Each movie’s allegory is deeply layered, building from movie to movie, and speaks to a different aspect of trans existence.

A global exploration of the Internet meme as an agent of pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on and offline and how they will save or destroy us all. Using social media-driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today's politics.

Cary Poarch started working at CNN in the summer of 2017 as a die-hard Bernie Sanders supporter. But on his first location shoot during the Charlottesville riots, he quickly became disillusioned with how the network created the “fine people” hoax. This began a political odyssey as he documented numerous incidents of outright bias, eventually leading him to contact James O’Keefe of Project Veritas. For months, Cary Poarch documented CNN’s rampant political bias for Project Veritas, and saw how the network was dividing the country.

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.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were only three major television networks. And there was only one Harlan Ellison taking them all to task in a series of weekly essays he wrote for the countercultural, underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, a.k.a. “The Freep”. For nearly four years, he channel-surfed through the mire of ABC, CBS, and NBC, finding little of value but much to critique. No one offered a more astute analysis of the idiot box’s influence on American culture, or its effects on the intelligence and psyche of viewers.

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.

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.

Discover Ancient Greece and Rome like never before with this compendium that begins with creation myth of Uranus and Gaea and includes descriptions and tales of gods both major and minor, as well as mythical creatures and other divinities. Author and scholar E.M. Berens also details how the people of ancient Greece and Rome worshiped, covering sacred sites and customs, as well as their significance. Berens's seminal work offers something for anyone interested in Greek and Roman mythology, whether they are just beginning to learn or are looking to add to already established knowledge.

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.

Producing the Acceptable Sex Worker considers how sex work is produced in news media narratives, a site where much of the general public draws its understanding of the industry in the absence of lived interaction with it. Taking New Zealand as a case study, this book considers an emerging discourse of acceptability for some sex workers, primarily those who do low-volume indoor work. Their acceptability is established in comparison with other kinds of sex workers, resulting in a redistribution but not a reduction of stigma.

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.

Taking listeners back to the days of TaB cola, dot matrix printers, and digging through the couch for just one more quarter, Alex Rubens combines his knowledge of the tech industry and experience as a gaming journalist to conjure the wild silicon frontier of the 8-bit ’80s. 8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari's Missile Command offers the first in-depth, personal history of an era for which fans have a lot of nostalgia.

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.

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.