“Music is a powerful tool in galvanizing people around an issue. There's no better way to get your point across than to put it in a beautiful song.” -- Ed SheeranDecember 2011, a ginger-haired performer hit rock bottom. Distanced from his family at a young age in an effort to make it in the music industry, this ambitious young musician put it all on the line. He used his God-given talent for small wages and beer and thankfully so with a lack of alternative income and ability to put...

Black Love Matters is an in-depth qualitative analysis that focuses on a diverse group of adult black men and their attitudes towards behavior in marriage and romantic relationships. To give voice to the men's narratives, Black Love Matters follows the men for four years, chronicling the experiences and the circumstances shaping their relationship trajectories. Highlights include discussions related to the roles that sex, infidelity, intimacy, trauma, family of origin, masculinity, and env...

In the late 2010s, the United States experienced a period of widespread silencing. Protests of unsafe drinking water have been met with tear gas; national park employees, environmentalists, and scientists have been ordered to stop communicating publicly. Advocates for gun control are silenced even as mass shootings continue. Expressed dissent to political power is labeled as “fake news.” DREAMers, Muslims, Trans military members, women, black bodies, the LGBTQI+ community, Latina/o/x commu...

The honest, entertaining and brilliantly relatable Sunday Times bestseller.Kate Lawler has never been maternal. And yet here she is: mother to Noa, after years of going back and forth about having children at all. This is the story of her journey from parentally undecided to early motherhood, via raging hormones, sleepless nights, emergency hospital trips, mum guilt, unspoken regrets and post-natal depression.This book is not a parenting manual. It...

Winner of the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Awards: "Twenty insanely inventive, hauntingly atmospheric and flat out coo coo for Cocoa Puffs stories" ( Hellnotes).A World Fantasy Award nominee, "this anthology . . . is a collection of some of the most talented horror and speculative fiction authors writing today" ( BuzzFeed). It includes all-new stories by Laird Barron, Pat Cadigan, Brian Evenson, Jeffrey Ford, Caítlin R. Kiernan, Garth Nix, Mich...

How do you avoid pyjama dramas and get a toddler to play ball at bedtime? How do you manage your child's time on the computer and kids who are couch potatoes? What do you do when your five year old starts telling lies? All the answers can be found in this comprehensive guide to coping with the challenges of childhood. A hand-selected panel of experts ranging from dentists to psychologists provide scholarly advice. But, crucially, there are hundreds of top tips and suggestions from other mu...

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...

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...

After Star Trek: Enterprise concluded in 2005, Star Trek went on hiatus until the 2009 film Star Trek and its sequels. With the success of these films, Star Trek returned to the small screen with series like Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds. These films and series, in different ways, reflect cultural shifts in Western society. Theology and Star Trek gathers a group of scholars from various religious and theological disciplines to reflect upon the connection between theology and St...

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...

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...