This title explores transnational media environments as a way to understand the gendered constructions and contradictions that support globalization, with special emphasis on women and a global feminist perspective.
Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and technologies, but in recent years a small number of commercially available 'game engines' have reached an unprecedented level of dominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the Unity game engine has penetrated all scales of videogame development, from the large studio to the hobbyist bedroom, such that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with Unity. This book provides an urgently needed critical analysis of Unity as ‘cultural software’ that facilitates particular production workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building on long-standing methods in media and cultural studies, and drawing on interviews with a range of videogame developers, Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh argue that Unity deploys a discourse of democratization to draw users into its ‘circuits of cultural software’. For scholars of media production, software culture, and platform studies, this book provides a framework and language to better articulate the increasingly dominant role of software tools in cultural production. For videogame developers, educators, and students, it provides critical and historical grounding for a tool that is widely used yet rarely analysed from a cultural angle.
Presenting students with a how-to guide to doing research in cultural studies, The Practice of Cultural Studies is an original introduction to the field.The book combines clear introductions to the core concepts of cultural studies with a very practical sense of how research in the field actually gets done.
Set against the background of Bolivia's prominent urban festival parades and the country's recent appearance on the front lines of antiglobalization movements, Circuits of Culture is the first social analysis of Bolivian film and television, their circulation through the social and national landscape, and the emergence of the country's indigenous video movement. At the heart of Jeff Himpele's examination is an ethnography of the popular television program, The Open Tribunal of the People. The indigenous and underrepresented majorities in La Paz have used the talk show to publicize their social problems and seek medical and legal assistance from the show's hosts and the political party they launched. Himpele studies the program in order to identify the possibilities of the mass media as a site for political discourse and as a means of social action. Charting as well the history of Bolivia's media culture, Himpele perceptively investigates cinematic media as sites for understanding the modernization of Bolivia, its social movements, and the formation of indigenous identities, and in doing so provides a new framework for exploring the circulation of culture as a way of creating publics, political movements, and producing media. Jeff D. Himpele is associate director for the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University. He is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker; his films include the award-winning Incidents of Travel in Chichen Itza and Taypi Kala: Six Visions of Tiwanaku.
Media Industries: History, Theory and Method is among the first texts to explore the evolving field of media industry studies and offer an innovative blueprint for future study and analysis. capitalizes on the current social and cultural environment of unprecedented technical change, convergence, and globalization across a range of textual, institutional and theoretical perspectives brings together newly commissioned essays by leading scholars in film, media, communications and cultural studies includes case studies of film, television and digital media to vividly illustrate the dynamic transformations taking place across national, regional and international contexts
From open source cultures, piracy, to amateur media and on-demand labour, informal media activities are vibrant in circuits of cultural production, distribution, consumption and labour utilisation in China. They come in different sizes and shapes, involve multiple actors, often with transnational ties and tensions, and challenge polemic views. Why do these informal activities occur, and how do they evolve? What cultural and social consequences do they have? In what ways do they pose challenges to governance and provoke us to rethink the notion? This book engages with diverse forms of the informal and their equally diverse interactions with the formal in the broader context of the rise of digital platforms, the contingent and complicated state–market interactions, and evolving roles of users. The book provides a vivid and original account of how digital platforms navigate formal and informal boundaries at both operational and discursive levels; how enthusiastic fans, aspiring amateurs, 'ordinary' users and necessity-driven labourers become integral to the formal/informal interface; and how state and non-state actors intervene in governing the formal/informal dynamics. In doing so, the book opens up new insights into the ongoing digital transformation in China.
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the issues, concepts and theories through which people have tried to understand consumer culture throughout the modern period, and puts the current state of thinking into a broader context. Thematically organized, the book shows how the central aspects of consumer culture - such as needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, culture - have been debated within modern theories, from those of earlier thinkers such as Marx and Simmel to contemporary forms of post-structuralism and postmodernism. This approach introduces consumer culture as a subject which - far from being of narrow or recent interest - is intimately tied to the central issues of modern times and modern social thought. With its reviews of major theorists set within a full account of the development of the subject, this book should be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in the many disciplines which now study consumer culture, including communications and cultural studies, anthropology and history.
How the Chinese pop of the 1960s participated in a global musical revolution What did Mao’s China have to do with the music of youth revolt in the 1960s? And how did the mambo, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan sound on the front lines of the Cold War in Asia? In Circuit Listening, Andrew F. Jones listens in on the 1960s beyond the West, and suggests how transistor technology, decolonization, and the Green Revolution transformed the sound of music around the globe. Focusing on the introduction of the transistor in revolutionary China and its Cold War counterpart in Taiwan, Circuit Listening reveals the hidden parallels between music as seemingly disparate as rock and roll and Maoist anthems. It offers groundbreaking studies of Mandarin diva Grace Chang and the Taiwanese folk troubadour Chen Da, examines how revolutionary aphorisms from the Little Red Book parallel the Beatles’ “Revolution,” uncovers how U.S. military installations came to serve as a conduit for the dissemination of Anglophone pop music into East Asia, and shows how consumer electronics helped the pop idol Teresa Teng bring the Maoist era to a close, remaking the contemporary Chinese soundscape forever. Circuit Listening provides a multifaceted history of Chinese-language popular music and media at midcentury. It profiles a number of the most famous and best loved Chinese singers and cinematic icons, and places those figures in a larger geopolitical and technological context. Circuit Listening’s original research and far-reaching ideas make for an unprecedented look at the role Chinese music played in the ’60s pop musical revolution.
This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive outline of how visual images, language and discourse work as `systems of representation'. Individual chapters explore: representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites; the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of the racialized `Other' in popular media, film and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; and the gendering of narratives in television soap operas.
Contemporary Consumer Culture Theory contains original research essays written by the premier thought leaders of the discipline from around the world that reflect the maturation of the field Customer Culture Theory over the last decade. The volume seeks to help break down the silos that have arisen in disciplines seeking to understand consumer culture, and speed both the diffusion of ideas and possibility of collaboration across frontiers. Contemporary Consumer Culture Theory begins with a re-evaluation of some of the fundamental notions of consumer behaviour, such as self and other, branding and pricing, and individual vs. communal agency then continuing with a reconsideration of role configurations as they affect consumption, examining in particular the ramifications of familial, gender, ethnic and national aspects of consumers’ lived experiences. The book move on to a reappraisal of the state of the field, examining the rhetoric of inquiry, the reflexive history and critique of the discipline, the prospect of redirecting the effort of inquiry to practical and humanitarian ends, the neglected wellsprings of our intellectual heritage, and the ideological underpinnings of the evolving construction of the concept of the brand. Contemporary Consumer Culture Theory is a reflective assessment, in theoretical, empirical and evocative keys, of the state of the field of consumer culture theory and an indication of the scholarly directions in which the discipline is evolving providing reflection upon a rapidly expanding discipline and altered consumption-scapes by some of its prime movers.