New Books in Communications

The average reader need not go far in a bookstore before, knowingly or not, they encounter authors who started their careers by self-publishing prior to achieving commercial success. Examples include Margaret Atwood, Andy Weir, Colleen Hoover, Anna Todd, E. L. James, Scarlett St. Clair, and many more. Such stories of self-made writers are compelling and seem more attainable to others with the accessibility of modern publishing platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Wattpad, Webtoon, Radish, Inkitt, Qidian, Tapas, and Swoon Reads. However, in Inequalities of Platform Publishing: The Promise and Peril of Self-Publishing in the Digital Book Era (U Massachusetts Press, 2025) Claire Parnell uncovers in her examination of the two most popular—Amazon and Wattpad—these services in fact perpetuate systemic racial, gender, and sexual bias against authors of color and queer authors through their technological, economic, social, and cultural structures. At a time when there is a real reckoning with the discrimination that has resulted in publishing opportunities for only relatively few privileged authors—who are often White, upper class, and male—self-publishing presents itself as an equalizer of sorts. Exploring that idea, Parnell shows that these platforms are not just intermediaries for information; they structure content and users in multiple, often inequitable, ways through their ability to set market conditions and apply algorithmic sorting. Combining original interviews, walkthrough method, metadata analysis, and more, Parnell finds that self-publishing platforms reproduce challenges for authors from marginalized communities. Far from equalizing the market, the new platforms instead frequently perpetuate the stubborn barriers to mainstream success for BIPOC and queer authors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Gwyneth Mellinger, a scholar of journalism history and author of *Racializing Objectivity*, explores how the white Southern press manipulated journalism standards to uphold Jim Crow. She discusses the reframing of civil rights coverage, seeing it as a debate over objectivity, and highlights the dismissal of the Black press as biased. Mellinger shares surprising archival findings revealing white editors' complicity in systemic racism and offers critical lessons for contemporary journalists to uncover underlying ideological biases.

Margaretha Geertsema-Sligh, a Professor of Journalism at Butler University, dives into her new book, which examines the intersection of journalism and gender across 92 countries. She highlights the systemic barriers women journalists face, including gendered violence and newsroom segregation. The conversation reveals how cultural stigmas around motherhood and caregiving impact women's careers. Geertsema-Sligh advocates for feminist media activism and decolonized journalism education to foster a more inclusive future in the media landscape.

Following the end of the Cold War, the world experienced a remarkable wave of democratization. Over the next two decades, numerous authoritarian regimes transitioned to democracies, and it seemed that authoritarianism as a political model was fading. But as recent events have shown, things have clearly changed.In Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics (Oxford UP, 2025), authors Dr. Alexander Cooley and Dr. Alexander Dukalskis reveal how today's authoritarian states are actively countering liberal ideas and advocacy surrounding human rights and democracy across various global governance domains. The transformed global context has unlocked for authoritarian states the possibility to contend with Western liberal soft power in new, traditionally "non-political" ways, including by plugging or even reversing the very channels of influence that originally spread liberalism. Dr. Cooley and Dr. Dukalskis ultimately advance a theory of authoritarian snapback, the process in which non-democratic states limit the transnational resonance of liberal ideas at home and advance anti-liberal norms and ideas into the global public sphere.Drawing from a range of evidence, including field work interviews and comparative case studies that demonstrate the changing nature of consumer boycotts, a database of authoritarian government administrative actions against foreign journalists, a database of global content-sharing agreement involving Chinese and Russian state media, and a database of transnational higher education partnerships involving authoritarian and democratic countries, this book doesn't just reveal the limits of the liberal influence taken for granted across the world. It offers a novel theory of how authoritarian governments figured out how to exploit and repurpose the same actors, tools, and norms that once exclusively promoted and sustained US-backed liberalism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Stefania Marghitu's Teen TV (Routledge, 2021)explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ways in which television has embraced youth subcultures, tracing the shifts in American and global televisual and youth cultures. Organized chronologically, Teen TV starts with Baby Boomers and moves to Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z as a way to contextualize and discuss cultural and historical contexts of teen television and television audiences. The book examines a wide range of historical and contemporary programming: from the broadcast bottleneck, multi-channel era that included youth targeted spaces like MTV, the WB, and the CW, to the rise of streaming platforms and global crossovers. It covers the thematic concerns and narrative structure of the coming-of-age story, and the prevalent genres of teen TV, and milestones faced by teen characters. The book also includes interviews with creators and showrunners of hit network television teen series, including Degrassi's Linda Schulyer, and the costume designer that established a heightened turn in the significance of teen fashion on the small screen in Gossip Girl, Eric Daman. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Sabrina Mittermeier, a cultural historian and editor of Fan Phenomena: Disney, dives into the complexities of Disney fandom. She reveals how fan studies challenge the notion of passive audiences and highlights issues of race, queerness, and corporate inclusion. Mittermeier also discusses the rise of 'Disney adults' and the impact of the pandemic on fan culture. With insights into fan labor, online engagement, and the evolving relationships between fans and the company, her findings pave the way for future research in Disney studies and representation.

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War.In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new forms of socialization and economic exchanges, while announcing the gradual crumbling of government control over the imagination of the people.By the mid-1990s, the VHS format was displaced by the DVD. The DVD would eventually give way to streaming. As explored in Videotape (Bloomsbury, 2025), by Dr. Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy in the Object Lessons series, the cultural legacy of the videotape continues to inform our relationship to technology, privacy, and to entertainment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

September 11th, 2001 marked the beginning of the so-called war on terror, but the attacks of that day also re-ignited battles over the nature of American patriotism. In Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11 (UNC Press, 2021), Professor John Bodnar argues that the nature of patriotism as being war-based or empathetic divided the nation as much as the responses to the 9/11 attacks. Using a variety of public media and private correspondence, Dr. Bodnar explores the different ways Americans tried to understand and remember 9/11, their disagreements over government responses to it, and how patriotism itself was also part of the debate. Dr. Bodnar shows how people on all the various sides to national security debates used patriotism as a motivating factor for their positions. Divided by Terrorshows how patriotism and how it is to be practiced was contested and fought over as much as the policies that it inspired. Dr. Bodnar is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University. He is the author of 8 academic books in addition to numerous journal articles. You can find a transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Jasbeer Mamalipurath’s TEDified Islam: Postsecular Storytelling in New Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) is the first of its kind in-depth examination of the TedTalk phenomenon and in particular how Islam and Muslim experiences are represented in these talks. Mamalipurath argues that TED Talks on Islam are part of a larger postsecular (the secular's renewed interest in faith) discourse. The book examines the perspectives of Muslim and non-Muslim TED viewers about TED's storytelling strategies. Finally, the book studies aspects of the authority that both Muslim and non-Muslim TED speakers represent and embody as ‘spokespersons of Islam.’ By doing so, this book offers an empirical and context-oriented understanding of postsecular storytelling by problematizing secular translations of Islam that are part of this TED talk universe. Themes the book explores include the nature of storytelling in a postsecular media environment, insider and outsider dynamics in how Islam is constructed and represented in digital media, the impacts of the 20th and 21st century media environment on how Islam and Muslim lives are translated for primarily non-Muslim audiences, the influence of Jewish and Christian frameworks on how stories of Islam get told, and the role of religion as faith in secular storytelling today. Listeners will certainly never look at TedTalks the same way after learning about the strategies, stories, and consequences of TEDified Islam from Mamalipurath’s research. Dr. Jasbeer Mamalipurath is a lecturer in media and broadcast studies at the School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen's University Belfast (UK). His research sits at the intersection of media, society, and culture. Dr. Jaclyn Michael is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (USA). She is the author of several articles on Muslim cultural representation, performance, and religious belonging in India and in the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

How did three words come to carry the weight of America's abortion debates? In Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025), Dr. Emily Winderman examines how this phrase shaped American reproductive politics and health care standards across generations. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book traces the unexpected origins of this rhetoric in urban reform movements, showing how early associations of alleys with sanitation, morality, and criminality created lasting impressions that would later influence abortion discourse. Dr. Winderman demonstrates how "back-alley abortion" was always more than just descriptive language—it has shaped perceptions of medical legitimacy and clinical spaces. The book reveals how this phrase emerged from racialized and gendered intersections of urban planning, public health, and social reform movements before becoming a rhetoric that anticipated pre–Roe v. Wade criminalized medical encounters. After Roe, back-alley abortion molded public memory through high-profile cases and later became a weaponized tool of anti-abortion activists to restrict access under the guise of sanitary clinical care. From nineteenth-century urban reformers to contemporary Supreme Court decisions, this study illuminates how three words came to carry the weight of America's most contentious health care debate. In our post-Dobbs era, as states grapple with new restrictions on reproductive rights, understanding the complex history and rhetorical power of "back-alley abortion" has never been more crucial. Drawing on rhetorical theory, reproductive justice theory, and the history of medicine, Back-Alley Abortion offers vital insights into how rhetoric shapes our understanding of medical legitimacy, clinical standards, and health care justice in the United States. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications