New Books in Communications

The Language of Climate Politics (Oxford UP, 2024) offers readers new ways to talk about the climate crisis that will help get fossil fuels out of our economy and save our planet. It's an analysis of the current discourse of American climate politics, but also a critical history of the terms that most directly influence the way not just conservatives but centrists on both sides of the political divide think and talk about climate change. In showing how those terms lead to mistaken beliefs about climate change and its solutions, the book equips readers with a new vocabulary that will enable them to neutralize climate propaganda and fight more effectively for a livable future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The vast majority of people who stream themselves playing videogames online do so with few or no viewers. In Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming Videogames on Twitch (MIT Press, 2025) Dr. Mia Consalvo, Dr. Marc Lajeunesse, and Dr. Andrei Zanescu investigate who they are, why they do so, and why this form of leisure activity is important to understand. Unlike the esports athletes and streaming superstars who receive the lion's share of journalistic and academic attention, microstreamers are not in it for the money and barely have an audience. In this, the first book dedicated to the latter group, the authors gather interviews from dozens of microstreamers from 2017 to 2019 to discuss their lives, struggles, hopes, and goals.For readers interested in livestreaming, and Twitch in particular, the book rethinks the medium's history through accounts of the everyday uses of webcams, with particular attention to notions of liveness and authenticity. These two concepts have become calling cards for the videogame livestreaming platform and underlie streamer motivations, the construction of their practices (whether casual, serious, or anywhere in between), and the complex “metas” that take shape over time. The book also looks at the authors' own practices of livestreaming, focusing on what can be gained through experiencing the lived reality of the practice. Finally, the authors explain how Twitch's platform (studied from 2017–2023) informs how streamers structure their every day and how corporate ideologies bleed into real-world spaces like TwitchCon.This book is available open-access via the MIT Press website.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

What is the future of reading? In Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Digital Age (Bloombury, 2024), Karl Berglund, Assistant Professor in Literature at Department of Literature and Rhetoric at Upsala University, examines the rise of audiobooks as a new mode of reading books. The analysis draws on digital humanities methods and a detailed industry case study to show who are the readers of audiobooks, how those readers engage and consume books, what sort of genres are most popular, and crucially how all of this us impacting on the publishing industry. The research also picks up on important themes of continuity and change represented by audiobooks, from ongoing issues of inequalities through to the new forms of writing practice and AI generated narrators. A richly detailed but easily accessible text, the book is essential reading for scholars across academia, as well as anyone interested in reading! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Microchips in our vaccines, stolen elections, climate change denial--in the face of a bewildering range of misbeliefs that stem from mistrust of informational sources, exposure to misinformation and disinformation, and partisan polarization, it's easy to dismiss those who disagree with us as "delusional", "psychotic", or merely "ignorant". But what if none of these judgments are supported by how we really come to believe things, and the truth is that we are all prone to false beliefs? What can we do to protect ourselves in this post-truth world?In False: How Mistrust, Disinformation, and Motivated Reasoning Make Us Believe Things That Aren't True (Oxford UP, 2025), psychiatrist and clinical professor Joe Pierre invites readers to journey with him through the normal quirks of brain functioning--such as "heuristics", cognitive biases, motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance, and bullshit receptivity--that create the cognitive vulnerabilities to false belief innate within us all. With a cross-disciplinary approach, False illuminates the psychology of false belief that lies at the root of contemporary media mistrust, science denialism, and political polarization, and highlights that contrary to popular opinion, deficits of intelligence and mental health are usually not to blame.With a refreshingly unbiased lens, Pierre suggests an antidote to false beliefs and makes the case for softening our convictions, viewing our ideological opponents with compassion, and mending the rifts in our relationships as individuals and societies alike.Joe Pierre MD is a Health Sciences Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.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

Why have dynamic and shifting hairstyles, from Katniss Everdeen’s Power Plait to JoJo Siwa’s outsize bows, become such a significant part of how girlhood is articulated in contemporary visual cultures? What do they tell us about how girlhood combines the qualities of resilience and sparkle needed to survive and thrive in turbulent post-recessionary times?Drawing together analysis of popular film franchises, Disney animation, ground-breaking TV shows, music videos, girl celebrity personas and global art cinema, Girls' Hairstories: Sparkle and Resilience in Contemporary Screen Cultures (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) by Dr. Fiona Handyside shows how across different cultural levels and aimed at different audiences, girls’ hairstyles provide a complex dynamic site of interpretation and interaction.It documents the careful craft of hair-dressers and software engineers working in the screen industries to style and animate hair, bringing their work to a new visibility. It is in the very everydayness of hairstyling that we come to understand girls as the most resilient and the most sparkly of citizens.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 Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. Melissa Vise, offers a new account of how the power of words changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that ushered in the era of modern democracies, Dr. Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in Europe’s monarchies but rather in Italy’s republics. Exploring the cultural process through which science and medicine, politics, law, literature, and theology together informed a new political ethics of speech, Dr. Vise uncovers the formation of a moral code where the regulation of the tongue became an integral component of republican values in medieval Europe.The medieval citizens of Italy’s republics understood themselves to be wholly subject to the power of words not because they lived in an age of persecution or doctrinal rigidity, but because words had furnished the grounds for their political freedom. Speech-making was the means for speaking the republic itself into existence against the opposition of aristocracy, empire, and papacy. But because words had power, they could also be deployed as weapons. Speech contained the potential for violence and presented a threat to political and social order, and thus needed to be controlled. Dr. Vise shows how the laws that governed and curtailed speech in medieval Italy represented broader cultural understandings of human susceptibility to speech. Tracing anthropologies of speech from religious to political discourse, from civic courts to ecclesiastical courts, from medical texts to the works of Dante and Boccaccio, The Unruly Tongue demonstrates that the thirteenth century marked a major shift in how people perceived the power, and the threat, of speech: a change in thinking about “what words do.”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

How did exhibitions become a vital tool for public communication in early twentieth century Britain? Showing resistance reveals how exhibitions were taken up by activists and politicians from 1933 to 1953, becoming manifestos, weapons of war and a means of signalling political solidarities.Drawing on dozens of examples mounted in empty shops, workers’ canteens, station ticket halls and beyond, this richly illustrated book shows how this overlooked form was created by significant makers including artists Paul Nash, John Heartfield and Oskar Kokoschka, architect Erno Goldfinger and photographer Edith Tudor-Hart.Showing Resistance: Propaganda and Modernist Exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53 (Manchester UP, 2024) is the first study of exhibitions as communications in mid-twentieth century BritainHarriet Atkinson is AHRC Leadership Fellow and Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at University of BrightonMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. 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 Dr Amy McHugh, an Academic Facilitator at the National Centre for Cultural Competence at the University of Sydney. Dr McHugh’s research focuses on the roles of technology and motivation in the continuous pursuit of cultural competence, and she facilitates workshops for both staff and students at the University of Sydney on these topics while working as the unit coordinator for the centre’s OLE: The Fundamentals of Cultural Competence. She also teaches online courses to undergraduate and graduate students in intercultural communication for the State University of New York at Oswego.In this episode, Brynn and Amy discuss Amy’s doctoral thesis entitled “Learning From Student Perceptions and Peer Feedback in a Virtual Exchange: Reconceptualizing Intercultural Competence as ‘ICCCSA’ – Intercultural Competence as a Co-Constructed and Situated Achievement”. This thesis explored Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) and its influence on (inter)cultural competence in digital spaces.References in this episode include the Intersectionality Matters Podcast, the National Centre for Cultural Competence and How to be Anti-Racist by Dr Ibram X. KendiFor 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

The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts, 1690–1776 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Kristin Olbertson is the first comprehensive study of criminal speech in eighteenth-century New England, traces how the criminalization, prosecution, and punishment of speech offenses in Massachusetts helped to establish and legitimate a social and cultural regime of politeness.Analyzing provincial statutes and hundreds of criminal prosecutions, Dr. Olbertson argues that colonists transformed their understanding of speech offenses, from fundamentally ungodly to primarily impolite. As white male gentility emerged as the pre-eminent model of authority, records of criminal prosecution and punishment show a distinct cadre of politely pious men defining themselves largely in contrast to the vulgar, the impious, and the unmanly. “Law,” as manifested in statutes as well as in local courts and communities, promoted and legitimized a particular, polite vision of the king's peace and helped effectuate the British Empire. In this unique and fascinating work, Dr. Olbertson reveals how ordinary people interacted with and shaped legal institutions.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

On June 8, 1967, Egypt's most famous radio broadcaster, Ahmed Said, reported that Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces had defeated the Israeli army in the Sinai, had hobbled their British and US allies, and were liberating Palestine. It was a lie.For the rest of his life, populations in the Middle East vilified Said for his duplicity. However, the truth was that, by 1967, all the world's major broadcasters to the Middle East were dissimulating on the air. For two decades, British, Soviet, American, and Egyptian radio voices created an audio world characterized by deceit and betrayal. In Frequencies of Deceit: How Global Propaganda Wars Shaped the Middle East (University of California Press, 2025), Dr. Margaret Peacock traces the history of deception and propaganda in Middle Eastern international radio. Dr. Peacock makes the compelling argument that this betrayal contributed to the loss of faith in Western and secular state-led political solutions for many in the Arab world, laying the groundwork for the rise of political Islam. 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