New Books in Communications

Jane Stevenson’s newest book, Women and Latin in the Early Modern Period (Brill, 2022), tracks the history and historiography of women Latinists in the early modern period. She relates how the first early modern women Latinists lived in mid-fourteenth century Italy, and were educated as diplomats. By the fifteenth century, other upper-class women were educated in order to perform as prodigies on behalf of their city. Both strands of education for women spread to other European countries in the course of the sixteenth century: the principal women humanists were either princesses or courtiers. In the seventeenth century Latin lost its importance as a language of diplomacy and was no longer needed at court, but there was still a place for the ‘woman prodigy’, and a variety of women performed in this way. However, the productions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century women Latinists are more extensive and more varied than those of their predecessors, and include scientific writing and ambitious translations. By the mid-nineteenth century the integration of studious women into the wider academy was well under way.Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.In this episode, our host Florence Madenga discusses the book Left to Our Own DevicesCoping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (2022) by Dr. Julia Ticona.You’ll hear about: Dr. Ticona’s intellectual trajectory and how her first monograph has been transformed from a dissertation project into a book What audience the book is intended for and what critical scholarship means for the author The design of the research project and the processes and ethics of conducting research about the gig economy How the ongoing pandemic has changed or altered the way Dr. Ticona thinks about this book The core arguments and take-away points from the book around keywords such as “digital inequality,” “precarity,” “platform economy,” and “digital hustle” The global implications of a study on low-wage gig economy workers in the American labor market The question of agency in workers’ everyday life and how people survive in the global platform economy The gendered nature of labor in the gig economy and what Dr. Ticona calls “tethered care work” How we can better understand the complexity of our mediated worlds and precarious work beyond the tech companies and digital platforms About the bookOver the past three decades, digital technologies like smartphones and laptops have transformed the way we work in the US. At the same time, workers at both ends of the income ladder have experienced rising levels of job insecurity and anxiety about their economic futures. In Left to Our Own Devices, Julia Ticona explores the ways that workers use their digital technologies to navigate insecure and flexible labor markets. Through 100 interviews with high and low-wage precarious workers across the US, she explores the surprisingly similar "digital hustles" they use to find work and maintain a sense of dignity and identity. Ticona then reveals how the digital hustle ultimately reproduces inequalities between workers at either end of polarized labor markets. A moving and accessible look at the intimate consequences of contemporary capitalism, Left to Our Own Devices will be of interest to sociologists, communication and media studies scholars, as well as a general audience of readers interested in digital technologies, inequality, and the future of work in the US.You can find this book on the Oxford University Press website.Author: Julia Ticona is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.Host: Florence Madenga is a doctoral fellow at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.Editor & Producer: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), addresses scholars and readers interested in literary studies, visual culture, and transformative justice in modern America. The book also transcends these areas to speak to readers in science & technology studies, in history of technology, or broadly interested in science justice.The premise of the book is that America was living through two collective experiments as it suffered the aftermath of the failed Reconstruction following the US Civil War. The first was the experiment of Black freedom and the second was the experiment of new technologies to document (Black) life at a time when standards for how to use and to read their outputs were excitingly wide-open. In the hands of Black cultural producers, the yield of these technologies was “undisciplined data,” which pointed to the possibility of true freedom not mere social reform as defined by White progressives.Readers follow writer Zora Neale Hurston working with anthropological film, WEB Dubois working with the social survey as a foundation for his urban sociology as well as for his literary novels, and other historical actors who were using documentary technologies to demonstrate the impossibility of capturing the fullness of Black sociality with those very technologies. Producing “undisciplined data,” Womack suggests, is not only a practice of the past, but the hope for greater justice in the present day.This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Science & Technology Studies.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Games can act as invaluable tools for the teaching of the Middle Ages. The learning potential of physical and digital games is increasingly undeniable at every level of historical study. These games can provide a foundation of information through their stories and worlds. They can foster understanding of complex systems through their mechanics and rules. Their very nature requires the player to learn to progress.The educational power of games is particularly potent within the study of the Middle Ages. These games act as the first or most substantial introduction to the period for many students and can strongly influence their understanding of the era. Within the classroom, they can be deployed to introduce new and alien themes to students typically unfamiliar with the subject matter swiftly and effectively. They can foster an interest in and understanding of the medieval world through various innovative means and hence act as a key educational tool.Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games: Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact (de Gruyter, 2022), edited by Robert Houghton, presents a series of essays addressing the practical use of games of all varieties as teaching tools within Medieval Studies and related fields. In doing so it provides examples of the use of games at pre-university, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels of study, and considers the application of commercial games, development of bespoke historical games, use of game design as a learning process, and use of games outside the classroom. As such, Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games is a flexible and diverse pedagogical resource and its methods may be readily adapted to the teaching of different medieval themes or other periods of history.Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Comedy is so frequently the topic of cultural dialogue, but it is rarely taken seriously as an object of study. Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times (Common Notions, 2022) offers a major contribution to theorizing comedy but also thinking about the particular politics of the genre today. Work is a joke and often the butt of our jokes. Madeline Lane-McKinley argues that in comedy, we find ways to endure and cope with the world of work, but also to question the conditions of capitalist life. When work is slowly killing us and destroying the planet and, at the same time, something impossible to imagine life without, Lane-McKinley considers the possibility of comedy as a revolutionary practice. By appealing to laughter we can counteract many of our shared miseries under capitalism, including our relationship to work. But to think through these revolutionary aspects of comedy, as a practice, also involves troubling comedy's relationship to the global right turn of the last decade. Stand-up comedy's claims to the artistic freedom of hate speech in comedy represent a fascistic current of our world today, blurring the boundaries between left and "alt" right. Against this current, Comedy Against Work draws from a tradition of feminist critical utopianism, Marxist-feminism, and contemporary cultural criticism to reflect on an anti-fascist poetics of comedy, grounded in a critique of work.In this conversation with host Annie Berke, Dr. Lane-McKinley discusses the origins of her project, her decision to include her own story and life in her academic analysis, and the comedic virtuosity of the feminist killjoy.Madeline Lane-McKinley is a writer, professor, and Marxist-feminist with a PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a founding member of Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The New Inquiry, Entropy, GUTS, and Cultural Politics. She is also the author of the chapbook Dear Z and a contributor to The Museum of Capitalism.Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, The A.V. Club, and The Washington Post. She earned her PhD in Film/Media and America Studies from Yale University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In Wandering Games (MIT Press, 2022), Melissa Kagen analyzes wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagen’s account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.Rebekah Buchanan is a 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

What is the journalism culture in Vietnam? What role does Sweden play in the transformation of Vietnamese journalism? How has Swedish media aid fulfilled its political aim to contribute to the democratic development of media in Vietnam? Andreas Mattsson speaks about how two media aid projects from Sweden were used to intervene in the development of journalism in Vietnam between 1993 and 2007.In a conversation with Joanne Kuai, PhD candidate at Karlstad University, Sweden and an affiliated PhD student at NIAS, Andreas Mattsson talks about how the Swedish media aid intervened in the Vietnamese media by contributing to a technological transition of journalism although the training in newsroom management and media ethics were challenged by conflicting journalism ideology and social norms.Drawing from interviews with Swedish trainers from the media aid projects and informed by his analysis of project documents that provide first-hand information from a period when Vietnamese journalism underwent a dramatic transition towards the digitalized media system existing today, Andreas Mattsson hopes to contribute to de-colonialize media theory to rethink the development of journalism in the Global South.Andreas Mattsson is a lecturer and program director at the School of Journalism at the Department of Communication and Media, Lund University. He is also a PhD student at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki and an affiliated researcher at the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET) at Lund University. He has conducted research and taught about journalism practice and digital technology from a comparative international perspective. Besides his university assignments, he works as a freelance journalist for various Swedish and Nordic newspapers and magazines.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Asianettverket at the University of Oslo, and the University of Helsinki.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: http://www.nias.ku.dk/Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) examines various forms of Russian online anti-establishment resistance, focusing in particular on the period between 2016 and 2019. Grounded in qualitative content analysis of the YouTube videos and social media activities of opposition activist Alexey Navalny and his associates, the book covers the history of digital resistance associated with this cohort, its style and strategies, and the impact that this form of political communication has had on the Russian public sphere.Sofya Glazunova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Glazunova specialises in political communication, digital resistance, Russian media, disinformation, fake news, and digital propaganda. In addition to Digital Activism in Russia: The Communication Tactics of Political Outsiders (2022), she is the co-author of the Global Disinformation Index report entitled Disinformation Risk Assessment: The Online News Market in Australia (2021).Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Digital platforms controlled by Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Tencent and Uber have transformed not only the ways we do business, but also the very nature of people's everyday lives. It is of vital importance that we understand the economic principles governing how these platforms operate. Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz's book The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy (Cambridge UP, 2021) explains the driving forces behind any platform business with a focus on network effects. The authors use short case studies and real-world applications to explain key concepts such as how platforms manage network effects and which price and non-price strategies they choose. This self-contained text is the first to offer a systematic and formalized account of what platforms are and how they operate, concisely incorporating path-breaking insights in economics over the last twenty years.Martin Peitz is professor of economics at the University of Mannheim (since 2007), a director of the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation – MaCCI (since 2009). He has been member of the economic advisory group on competition policy (EAGCP) at the European Commission (2013–2016), an academic director of the Centre on Regulation in Europe, CERRE (2012–2016) and head of the Department of Economics (2010–2013). Martin has widely published in leading economics journals. He also frequently trains and advises government agencies in Europe and abroad on competition and regulation issues.Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (U Minnesota Press, 2022) insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words.Queer Silence begins by historicizing silence’s negative reputation, beginning with the ways homophile activists rejected medical models pathologizing homosexuality as a disability, resulting in the silencing of disability itself. This silencing was redoubled by HIV/AIDS activism’s demand for “out, loud, and proud” rhetorical activities that saw silence as capitulation.Reading a range of cultural artifacts whose relative silence has failed to attract queer attachment, from anonymous profiles on Grindr to ex-gays to belated gender transitions to disability performance art, Dr. Smilges argues for silence’s critical role in serving the needs of queers who are never named as such. Queer Silence urges queer activists and queer studies scholars to reconcile with their own ableism by acknowledging the liberatory potential of silence, a mode of engagement that disattached queers use every day for resistance, sociality, and survival.J. Logan Smilges is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia.Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications