Recent Publications

Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero Marita Sturken

In Tourists of History, the cultural critic Marita Sturken argues that over the past two decades, Americans have responded to national trauma through consumerism, kitsch sentiment, and tourist practices in ways that reveal a tenacious investment in the idea of America’s innocence. Sturken investigates the consumerism that followed from the September 11th attacks; the contentious, ongoing debates about memorials and celebrity-architect designed buildings at Ground Zero; and two outcomes of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City: the Oklahoma City National Memorial and the execution of Timothy McVeigh.

Nations Matter: Citizenship, Solidarity, and the Cosmopolitan Dream Craig Calhoun

Craig Calhoun, one of the most respected social scientists in the world, re-examines nationalism in light of post-1989 enthusiasm for globalization and the new anxieties of the twenty-first century. Nations Matter argues that pursuing a purely postnational politics is premature at best and possibly dangerous. Calhoun argues that, rather than wishing nationalism away, it is important to transform it. One key is to distinguish the ideology of nationalism as fixed and inherited identity from the development of public projects that continually remake the terms of national integration. Standard concepts like 'civic' vs. 'ethnic' nationalism can get in the way unless they are critically re-examined – as an important chapter in this book does. This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, history, political theory and all subjects concerned with nationalism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism.

What Are Journalists For? Jay Rosen

The public journalism movement emerged after the 1988 presidential election as a countermeasure against eroding trust in the news media and widespread public disillusionment with politics and civic affairs. In this book, public journalism advocate Jay Rosen recalls the history of the movement and explains how its innovations offer an opportunity to revitalize the press and improve civic life.

Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain Faye D. Ginsburg (Editor)

This groundbreaking volume showcases the exciting work emerging from the ethnography of media, a burgeoning new area in anthropology that expands both social theory and ethnographic fieldwork to examine the way media - film, television, video - are used in societies around the globe, often in places that have been off the map of conventional media studies. The contributors, key figures in this new field, cover topics ranging from indigenous media projects around the world to the unexpected effects of state control of media to the local impact of film and television as they travel transnationally. Their essays, mostly new work produced for this volume, bring provocative new theoretical perspectives grounded in cross-cultural ethnographic realities to the study of media.

Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media Eric Klinenberg

For the residents of Minot, North Dakota, Clear Channel Communications is synonymous with disaster. Early in the morning of January 18, 2002, a train derailment sent a cloud of poisonous gas drifting toward the small town. Minot's fire and rescue departments attempted to reach Clear Channel, which owned and operated all six local commercial radio stations, to warn residents of the approaching threat. But in the age of canned programming and virtual DJs, there was no one in the conglomerate's studio to take the call. The people of Minot were taken unawares. The result: one death and more than a thousand injuries.

Opening with the story of the Minot tragedy, Eric Klinenberg's Fighting for Air takes us into the world of preprogrammed radio shows, empty television news stations, and copycat newspapers to show how corporate ownership and control of local media has remade American political and cultural life. Klinenberg argues that the demise of truly local media stems from the federal government's malign neglect, as the agencies charged with ensuring diversity and open competition have ceded control to the very conglomerates that consistently undermine these values and goals.

Such "big media" may not be here to stay, however. Fighting for Air delivers a call to action, revealing a rising generation of new media activists and citizen journalists-a coalition of liberals and conservatives-who are demanding and even creating the local coverage they need and deserve.

The Rise of the Image the Fall of the Word Mitchell Stephens

For decades educators and cultural critics have deplored the corrosive effects of electronic media on the national consciousness. The average American reads less often, writes less well. And, numbed by the frenetic image-bombardment of music videos, commercials and sound bites, we may also, it is argued, think less profoundly. But wait. Is it just possible that some good might arise from the ashes of the printed word?

Most emphatically yes, argues Mitchell Stephens, who asserts that the moving image is likely to make our thoughts not more feeble but more robust. Through a fascinating overview of previous communications revolutions, Stephens demonstrates that the charges that have been leveled against television have been faced by most new media, including writing and print. Centuries elapsed before most of these new forms of communication would be used to produce works of art and intellect of sufficient stature to overcome this inevitable mistrust and nostalgia. Using examples taken from the history of photography and film, as well as MTV, experimental films, and Pepsi commercials, the author considers the kinds of work that might unleash, in time, the full power of moving images. And he argues that these works--an emerging computer-edited and -distributed "new video"--have the potential to inspire transformations in thought on a level with those inspired by the products of writing and print. Stephens sees in video's complexities, simultaneities, and juxtapositions, new ways of understanding and perhaps even surmounting the tumult and confusions of contemporary life.

Sure to spark lively - even heated - debate, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word belongs in the library of millennium-watchers everywhere.

Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technology Marita Sturken (editor)

For as long as people have developed new technologies, there has been debate over the purposes, shape, and potential for their use. In this exciting collection, a range of contributors, including Sherry Turkle, Lynn Spigel, John Perry Barlow, Langdon Winner, David Nye, and Lord Asa Briggs, discuss the visions that have shaped "new" technologies and the cultural implications of technological adaptation. Focusing on issues such as the nature of prediction, community, citizenship, consumption, and the nation, as well as the metaphors that have shaped public debates about technology, the authors examine innovations past and present, from the telegraph and the portable television to the Internet, to better understand how our visions and imagination have shaped the meaning and use of technology.

Canada's Hollywood: The Canadian State and Feature Films Ted Magder

The development of the feature film industry in Canada has been uncertain and difficult, with problems usually attributed to the country's small population and US domination of the movie industry. Ted Magder goes beyond these obvious influences in his examination of Canada's state policies as they affected the production of Canadian feature films from the First World War to the present. He presents a study focusing on the interplay between government policy and the dynamics of the industry, and undertakes an examination of cultural dependency in Canada. State policies, Magder points out, are related to domestic forces that impinge upon and set limits to policy decisions and their implementation.

The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era George Yúdice

The Expediency of Culture is a pioneering theorization of the changing role of culture in an increasingly global world. George Yúdice explores critically how groups ranging from indigenous activists to nation-states to nongovernmental organizations have all come to see culture as a valuable resource to be invested in, contested, and used for varied sociopolitical and economic ends. Through a dazzling series of illustrative studies, Yúdice challenges the Gramscian notion of cultural struggle for hegemony and develops instead an understanding of culture where cultural agency at every level is negotiated within globalized contexts dominated by the active management and administration of culture. He describes a world where "high" culture (such as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain) is a mode of urban development, rituals and everyday aesthetic practices are mobilized to promote tourism and the heritage industries, and mass culture industries comprise significant portions of a number of countries' gross national products.

Yúdice contends that a new international division of cultural labor has emerged, combining local difference with transnational administration and investment. This does not mean, he points out, that today's increasingly transnational culture-exemplified by the entertainment industries and the so-called global civil society of nongovernmental organizations-is necessarily homogenized. He demonstrates that national and regional differences are still functional, shaping the meaning of phenomena from pop songs to antiracist activism. Yúdice considers a range of sites where identity politics and cultural agency are negotiated in the face of powerful transnational forces. He analyzes appropriations of American funk music as well as a citizen action initiative in Rio de Janeiro to show how global notions such as cultural difference are deployed within specific social fields. He provides a political and cultural economy of a vast and increasingly influential art event- inSite, a triennial festival extending from San Diego to Tijuana. He also reflects on Miami as one of a number of transnational "cultural corridors" and on the uses of culture in an unstable world where censorship and terrorist acts interrupt the usual channels of capitalist and artistic flows.

Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy Stephen Duncombe

Arguing that "fantasy and spectacle have become the property of fascism," theorist, performer and activist Duncombe asserts that progressives should "build a politic that embraces the dreams of people and fashion spectacles that give those dreams form." His persuasive and pyrotechnic display of radical political thinking draws on a quirky mix of models-celebrity culture, the video game Grand Theft Auto and Umberto Eco's idea of opera aperta or free interpretation of art-to delineate how progressives can convey their message to a larger audience. What makes this polemic both inventive and exciting is its author's love of high and popular culture, which allows for deft juxtapositions of cultural icons like Bette Davis, Charles Baudelaire, Dungeons and Dragons and Tony Soprano. While many of his arguments have a flashy aura, Duncombe (The Bobbed-Haired Bandit) also makes incisive observations, such as that Cindy Sheehan and Rosa Parks had significant political experience before they entered the public eye or that politics rests as much on the imagination as reality. Noting that much current progressive writing retools old modes of thought, he persuasively and entertainingly argues that "if we really want to change reality, then we have to try and do something different."

Expanding the Boundaries of Intellectual Property Diane L. Zimmerman

This book focuses on the question of how much control innovators should be given over their works. The first parts examine the trend to increase control: first, by expanding the scope of intellectual property rights to add new subject matter; secondly, through increasing transactional autonomy. The former issue represents the key concerns of the intellectual property community; the latter issue is currently before both state and national legislatures.

The question that these groups are debating is the subject of the next part: whether strong intellectual property rights, coupled with a high degree of transactional autonomy, promote innovation or chill interchange. One view is that the current legal regime should not be altered because it represents the right balance between the needs of information producers and the requirements of users. The contrary view is that stronger rights would allow potential collaborators to find one another, bargain for beneficial exchanges, and reallocate rights. The final sections explore the bases in constitutions, laws, and treaties for protecting the public domain. Four judges from the US federal courts and the UK high court then debate the practicalities of the frameworks proposed.

Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture Nicholas Mirzoeff

Groundbreaking and compelling, Watching Babylon examines the experience of watching the war against Iraq on television, on the internet, in the cinema and in print media.

Mirzoeff shows how the endless stream of images flowing from the Gulf has necessitated a new form of visual thinking, one which recognizes that the war has turned images themselves into weapons.

Drawing connections between the history and legend of ancient Babylon, the metaphorical Babylon of Western modernity, and everyday life in the modern suburb of Babylon, New York, Mirzoeff explores ancient concerns which have found new resonance in the present day.

In the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Watching Babylon illuminates the Western experience of the Iraqi war and makes us re-examine the very way we look at images of conflict.

Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space Anna McCarthy

Although we tend to think of television primarily as a household fixture, TV monitors outside the home are widespread: in bars, laundromats, and stores; conveying flight arrival and departure times in airports; uniting crowds at sports events and allaying boredom in waiting rooms; and helping to pass the time in workplaces of all kinds. In Ambient Television Anna McCarthy explores the significance of this pervasive phenomenon, tracing the forms of conflict, commerce, and community that television generates outside the home.

Discussing the roles television has played in different institutions from 1945 to the present day, McCarthy draws on a wide array of sources. These include retail merchandising literature, TV industry trade journals, and journalistic discussions of public viewing, as well as the work of cultural geographers, architectural theorists, media scholars, and anthropologists. She also uses photography as a research tool, documenting the uses and meanings of television sets in the built environment, and focuses on such locations as the tavern and the department store to show how television is used to support very different ideas about gender, class, and consumption. Turning to contemporary examples, McCarthy discusses practices such as Turner Private Networks' efforts to transform waiting room populations into advertising audiences and the use of point-of-sale video that influences brand visibility and consumer behavior. Finally, she inquires into the activist potential of out-of-home television through a discussion of the video practices of two contemporary artists in everyday public settings.