New Books in Communications

Friendships can be the foundation of our earliest memories and most formative moments. But why are they often seen as secondary to romantic, or familial connection, something to age out of and take a back seat to other relationships? BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship (404 Ink, 2023) by Dr. Anahit Behrooz is an examination of the power of female friendship, not as something lesser, but as a site of radical intimacy, as told through the cultural touchstones around us.From coming-of-age tales through physical intimacy and discovering personhood to break ups and parting of ways, Dr. Behrooz considers the vast significance of our friendships through the work of Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante, Booksmart and Grey’s Anatomy, Insecure, The Virgin Suicides and beyond.To have a life rich in love is often viewed through a specific lens; BFFs shows us that friendship can offer a more expansive and emancipatory understanding of female intimacy, and can be the most important, loving relationships in our lives.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The 2020 Presidential Election in the United States marked, for many, a return to "compassionate politics." Joe Biden had run on a platform of empathy, emphasising his personal history as a means of connecting with everyone from American workers who had lost jobs to military families who had lost loved ones. Although perceptions of candidate compassion are broadly understood to influence vote choice, less understood is the question of how candidates convince voters they truly "care about people like them." In Feeling their Pain: Why Voters Want Leaders who Care (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Jared McDonald provides a framework for understanding why voters view some politicians as more compassionate than others.Dr. McDonald shows that perceptions of compassion in candidates for public office are based on the number and intensity of commonalities that bind citizens to political leaders. Commonalities can come in many forms, such as a shared experience ("I've been through what you've been through"), a shared emotion ("I feel the way you feel"), or a shared identity ("I am who you are"). Compassion is conceptualised through the lens of self-interest. Compassion may be universal, such as when candidates convey empathy to all individuals who are struggling. Or compassion may be exclusionary, such as when candidates express a preference for some groups over others. Thus, the way campaigns choose to wield compassion in their messaging strategies has important implications not only for election outcomes, but for American political polarisation as well.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s book Sound in Indian Film and Audiovisual Media: History, Practices and Production (Amsterdam UP, 2023) is an exhaustive attempt to study film sound in the Indian subcontinent through artistic research. It aims to fill a significant scholarly void by addressing issues of sound and listening within the cultural contexts of the Global South. By developing a comprehensive understanding of the unique soundscapes of Indian film and audiovisual media, his study examines the evolution of sound, from early optical recordings to contemporary digital audio technologies. It unfolds the intricate ways in which sound contributes to the storytelling, emotional resonance, and cultural significance of Indian films. Chattopadhyay’s research is informed by his personal experiences as a sound practitioner and through extensive conversations with leading sound professionals across the Indian subcontinent. This approach allows for a deep dive into the practical and creative processes that shape the auditory dimensions of Indian cinema. Broadly, Chattopadhay’s work is a significant contribution to film history, sound studies, and media studies.Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is a media artist, researcher, and writer. He has an expansive body of scholarly publications in media arts history, artistic research, media theory and aesthetics in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of five books, including The Nomadic Listener (2020), The Auditory Setting (2021), Between the Headphones (2021), and Sound Practices in the Global South (2022). Dr. Chattopadhyay holds a PhD in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM), Basel, Switzerland, and a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD), University of Bergen, Norway.Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her interdisciplinary academic interests lie at the intersection of film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, anthropology of the body, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Implications of Pre-Emptive Data Surveillance for Fundamental Rights in the European Union (Brill Nijhoff, 2023) Julia Wojnowska-Radzińska offers a comprehensive legal analysis of various forms of pre-emptive data surveillance adopted by the European legislator and their impact on fundamental rights. It also identifies what minimum guarantees have to be set up to recognize pre-emptive data surveillance as a legitimate measure in a democratic society. The book aims to answer the essential question of how to strike the proper balance between fundamental rights and security interests in the digital age.Caleb Zakarin is Editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Serial Mexico: Storytelling Across Media, from Nationhood to Now (Vanderbilt UP, 2023) responds to a continued need to historicize and contextualize seriality, particularly as it exists outside of dominant U.S./European contexts. In Mexico, serialization has been an important feature of narrative since the birth of the nation. Amy Wright's exploration begins with a study of novels serialized in pamphlets and newspapers by key Mexican authors of the nineteenth century, showing that serialization was essential to the development of both the novel and national identities--to Mexican popular culture--during its foundational period. In the twentieth century, a technological explosion after the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) set Mexico's transmedial wheels into motion, as a variety of media recycled and repurposed earlier serialized tales, themselves drawn from a repertoire of oral traditions to national nostalgic effect. Along the way, Serial Mexico responds to the following series of questions: How has serialized storytelling functioned in Mexico? How can we better understand the relationship of seriality to transmediality through this historical case study? Which stories (characters, themes, storylines, and storyworlds) have circulated repeatedly over time? How have those stories defined Mexico? The goal of this book is to begin to understand some of the possible answers to these questions through five case studies, which highlight five key artifacts, in five different media, at five different historical points spanning nearly two hundred years of Mexico's history. Serial Mexico offers important insights into not only the topic of serialized storytelling, but to larger notions of how national identities are created through narrative, with crucial cultural and sometimes political implications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In this Pandemic Perspectives Podcast, Ideas Roadshow founder and host Howard Burton talks to Elizabeth Anderson, Max Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy at the University of Michigan, on the need for making increased efforts to explicitly create occasions for people to frankly communicate with each other during a crisis.Ideas Roadshow's Pandemic Perspectives Project consists of three distinct, reinforcing elements: a documentary film (Pandemic Perspectives), book (Pandemic Perspectives: A filmmaker's journey in 10 essays) and a series of 24 detailed podcasts with many of the film's expert participants. Visit www.ideasroadshow.com for more detailsHoward Burton is the founder of Ideas Roadshow and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Joseph A. Skloot joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, First Impressions: Sefer hasimdim and Early Modern Hebrew Printing (Brandeis UP, 2023). First Impressions uncovers the history of creative adaptation and transformation through a close analysis of the creation of the Sefer Hasidim book. In 1538, a partnership of Jewish silk makers in the city of Bologna published a book entitled Sefer Hasidim, a compendium of rituals, stories, and religious instruction that primarily originated in medieval Franco-Germany. How these men, of Italian and Spanish descent, came to produce a book that would come to shape Ashkenazic culture, and Jewish culture more broadly, over the next four centuries is the basis of this kaleidoscopic study of the history of Hebrew printing in the sixteenth century.During these early years of printing, the classic works of ancient and medieval Hebrew and Jewish literature became widely available to Jewish (and non-Jewish) readers for the first time. Printing, though, was not merely the duplication and distribution of pre-existing manuscripts, it was the creative adaptation and transformation of those manuscripts by printers. Ranging from Catholic Bologna to Protestant Basel to the Jewish heartland of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Skloot uncovers the history of that creativity by examining the first two print editions of Sefer Hasidim. Along the way, he demonstrates how volumes that were long thought to be eternal and unchanging were in fact artifacts of historical agency and contingency, created by and for human beings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Seeking Truth in International News: China, CGTN and the BBC (Routledge, 2023) Dr Vivien Marsh analyses the differences between journalistic traditions in China and the West, and extent to which this impacts the ability of news media to hold power to account. This facilitates a fascinating account of the role of journalists in seeking truth from facts, and the way that public narratives of events are constructed. The book has extensive global coverage, and readers will come to understand the significance of both what is reported, and also the significance of scrutinising what is left out. Dr Vivien Marsh is an independent academic researcher at The University of Westminster, UK. She is a former global news editor, reporter and writer.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Record Cultures: The Transformation of the U.S. Recording Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2020), Kyle Barnett tells the story of the smaller U.S. record labels in the 1920s that created the genres later to be known as blues, country, and jazz.Barnett also engages the early recording industry as entertainment media, considering the ways in which sound recording, radio, and film converge in the late 1920s. Record Cultures explores Gennett Records and jazz; race records, with a focus on the African American-owned Black Swan Records, as well as the white-owned Paramount Records; the origins of old-time music as a category that will become country; the growth of radio; the intersections of music and film; and the recording industry’s challenges in the wake of the Great Depression.Kyle Barnett is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Bellarmine University.Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Her book, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press in December 2020. Mack is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, Village Voice, PopMatters, and Hot Press. She published a 2019 essay for Longreads titled “Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Brynn Quick speaks with best-selling author and linguist Gretchen McCulloch about her 2019 New York Times bestselling book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Riverhead Books, 2020). Gretchen has written a Resident Linguist column at The Toast and Wired. She is also the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a wildly popular podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.Because Internet is for anyone who’s ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It’s the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that’s a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications