This edited collection explores the malleability and influence of body image, focusing particularly on how media representation and popular culture’s focus on the body exacerbates the crucial social influence these representations can have on audiences’ perceptions of themselves and others. Contributors investigate the cultural context and lived experiences of individuals’ relationships with their bodies, going beyond examination of the thin, ideal body type to explore the emerging represe...

This book builds on existing conversations surrounding millennials and media use by examining Generation Z’s engagement with new media technologies and comparing it to that of millennials. Ahmet Atay and Mary Z. Ashlock have assembled this edited volume in which contributors focus on three interrelated areas: how millennials and Gen Z use new media technologies and platforms in different contexts; how they use media and what they do with it; and the relationship between the two generations...

Friends, Lovers, Co-Workers, and Community analyzes how television narratives form the first decade of the twenty-first century are powerful socializing agents which both define and limit the types of acceptable interpersonal relationships between co-workers, friends, romantic partners, family members, communities, and nations. This book is written by a diverse group of scholars who used a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to interrogate the ways through which television...

Africana Race and Communication: A Social Study of Film, Communication, and Social Media focuses on the areas of History, Ethos, Motif, and Mythology-Philosophy. This study is an interdisciplinary study, which surveys the collection, interpretation, and analysis of Black communication and culture. Likewise, the intellectual dexterity of Africana Studies as an interdisciplinary body of knowledge postures alternative ways of probing Africana phenomena. This volume provides a categorical lens...

This book critically analyzes the portrayals of Black women in current reality television. Audiences are presented with a multitude of images of Black women fighting, arguing, and cursing at one another in this manufactured world of reality television. This perpetuation of negative, insidious racial and gender stereotypes influences how the U.S. views Black women. This stereotyping disrupts the process in which people are able to appreciate cultural and gender difference. Instead of celebr...

Popular culture helps construct, define, and impact our everyday realities and must be taken seriously because popular culture is, simply, popular. Communication Perspectives on Popular Culture brings together communication experts with diverse backgrounds, from interpersonal communication, business and organizational communication, mass communication, media studies, narrative, rhetoric, gender studies, autoethnography, popular culture studies, and journalism. The contributors tackle such ...

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.Game theory shows that in order to coordinate its actions, a group of people must form "common knowledge." Each person wants to p...

There's no denying that men's involvement and interest in feminism is key to its continuing relevance and importance. Addressing the question of why men should care about feminism in the first place, Men and Feminism lays the foundation for a larger discussion about feminism as a human issue, not simply a women's issue. Men are crucial to the movement—as fathers, brothers, husbands, boyfriends, and friends.From "why" to "how" to "what can men do", Men and Feminism...

Utilizing each chapter to present core topical and timely examples, Pop Culture Freaks highlights the tension between inclusion and individuality that lies beneath mass media and commercial culture, using this tension as a point of entry to an otherwise expansive topic. He systematically considers several dimensions of identity—race, class, gender, sexuality, disability—to provide a broad overview of the field that encompasses classical and contemporary theory, original data, topi...

When the 2016 Oscar acting nominations all went to whites for the second consecutive year, #OscarsSoWhite became a trending topic. Yet these enduring racial biases afflict not only the Academy Awards, but also Hollywood as a whole. Why do actors of color, despite exhibiting talent and bankability, continue to lag behind white actors in presence and prominence?Reel Inequality examines the structural barriers minority actors face in Hollywood, while shedding light on how the...

Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, International Edition ventures beyond the history of pop culture to give readers the vocabulary and tools to address and analyze the contemporary cultural landscape that surrounds them.Moves beyond the history of pop culture to give students the vocabulary and tools to analyze popular culturesuitable for the study of popular culture across a range of disciplines, from literary theory and cultural studies to philosophy and so...