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Disability Media Studies

Bill Kirkpatrick

Elizabeth Ellcessor (ed.)

Disability Media Studies proposes the formation of a field of study, based in the rich traditions of media, cultural, and disability studies. Such a field is necessarily interdisciplinary and ... More

Disability Media Studies proposes the formation of a field of study, based in the rich traditions of media, cultural, and disability studies. Such a field is necessarily interdisciplinary and diverse, arising from cross-pollinating conversations and engagements. Thus, this collection offers fourteen chapters written by scholars located in a variety of disciplinary homes, all exploring media artifacts in light of disability. Additionally, two afterwords—by Rachel Adams, and Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne—reflect upon the collection, the ongoing conversations, and the future of disability media studies. This book is intended to be accessible, teachable, and friendly to newcomers to the study of disability and media alike. Case studies include familiar contemporary examples—such as the blockbuster film Iron Man 3 (2013), Lady Gaga, and Oscar Pistorius—as well as historical media, independent disability media, reality television, and media technologies. Chapters consider disability representation, the role of media in forming cultural assumptions about ability, the construction of disability via media technologies, and how disabled audiences respond to particular media artifacts. Each chapter is preceded by a short abstract, orienting the reader by explaining the background and contribution of the essay.Less

Shakespeare and the Origins of English

Neil Rhodes

This book is about what there was before the subject known as English existed, and about how that became English. The first half of the book deals principally with English as an academic discipline ... More

This book is about what there was before the subject known as English existed, and about how that became English. The first half of the book deals principally with English as an academic discipline that emerges out of the study of rhetoric, while the second half is more concerned with the development of a national body of literature in the vernacular. The book is focused specifically on Shakespeare’s role in the origins of the subject, and discusses the kinds of literary and educational practice that would have formed his experience and shaped his work. It traces the origins of English in the aspects of the educational regime that existed before English literature became an established part of the curriculum, and then presents Shakespeare as both a product of those disciplines and, in the 18th century, as an agent of their transformation into the subject that emerged as the modern study of English. This earlier historical period is also addressed from the perspective of the current state of English as a subject, and shows the affinity between rhetoric and modern concepts and practices, such as media studies, creative writing, and the online literary database. It is argued that the future for English lies in its reclaiming the creative, performative, and interactive territory originally covered by rhetoric and illustrated most powerfully by Shakespeare.Less

Poiesis and Enchantment in Topological Matter

Xin Wei Sha

Movement, and in particular, gesture are arguably essential aspects of engendering human experience. But rather than taking “the body” or “cognition” for granted as conceptual starting points, we ... More

Movement, and in particular, gesture are arguably essential aspects of engendering human experience. But rather than taking “the body” or “cognition” for granted as conceptual starting points, we attend to the substrate matter in which gesture takes shape and place. An experimental approach to such questions motivates the exploration of responsive, and in particular, computational media created for sustaining experientially rich, improvisational activity. This book explores rehearsed as well as unrehearsed activity in distributed, continuous fields of responsive media—topological matter. This philosophical and interdisciplinary investigation reworks our understanding of embodiment and the formation of subjective experience. The investigation also puts in play notions such as interaction, responsive media and performativity, contributing to contemporary exchanges between art and philosophy. This draws on emerging techniques in computational video, realtime gestural sound, sensors, and active textiles, as well as experimental techniques in performance, movement, and visual arts. It also offers insights and inspirations for designers, media artists, musicians, movement artists, architects, researchers in multimedia, interaction design, interactive and responsive environments, architecture, science and technology studies, philosophy and cultural studies.Less

The Media Commons: Globalization and Environmental Discourses

Patrick D. Murphy

Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. ... More

Today's global media sustains a potent new environmental consciousness. Paradoxically, it also serves as a far-reaching platform that promotes the unsustainable consumption ravaging our planet. Patrick Murphy musters theory, institutional analysis, fieldwork, and empirical research to map how the media communicates today's many distinct, competing, and even antagonistic environmental discourses, demonstrating how the media pushes us to save the whales even as we are encouraged to devour all the fish. By examining this paradox through case studies of the “greening” of cable TV, online corporate branding campaigns, indigenous media, and the globalization of commercial media, he shows how today's complex, integrated media networks draws the cultural boundaries of our environmental imagination—and influences just who benefits. Analysis emphasizes social context, institutional alignments, and commercial media's ways of rendering discussion. Murphy identifies and examines key terms, phrases, and metaphors as well as the ways consumers are presented with ideas like agency and the place of nature. What emerges is the link between pervasive messaging and an "environment" conjured by our media-saturated social imagination. As the author shows, today's complex, integrated media networks shape, frame, and deliver many of our underlying ideas about the environment. Increasingly—and ominously—individuals and communities experience these ideas not only in the developed world but in the increasingly consumption-oriented Global South.Less

Talk Radio, the Mainstream Press, and Public Opinion in Hong Kong

Francis L.F. Lee

Phone-in programs on public and commercial radio channels have been a staple of popular Hong Kong politics since the 1990s. In the absence of a fully democratic system, they have played an ... More

Phone-in programs on public and commercial radio channels have been a staple of popular Hong Kong politics since the 1990s. In the absence of a fully democratic system, they have played an influential role in channeling and mediating public opinion. This work examines the phenomenon of talk radio in Hong Kong, using as its analytical framework the idea of remediation. It argues that the circulation and re-circulation of talk radio content through the mainstream media is crucial in explaining the medium's social prominence and influence. The process has not only widened the dissemination of talk radio content, but also established talk radio as a channel as well as a symbol for free political expression, giving it a role in shaping serious debate not seen in many other societies. Drawing on interviews with radio personnel, analysis of radio and newspaper content, and audience surveys, Talk Radio explores the vital and influential world of Hong Kong's phone-in programs. The book will be of interest to scholars of politics, media studies, and cultural studies both in Hong Kong and overseas.Less

The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens

Sarah Winter

What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories ... More

What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, this book illuminates the ways that Dickens's serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction associated with the growth of periodical publication in the nineteenth century but also the school subject we now know as “English.” Examining a set of Dickens's most popular novels from The Pickwick Papers to Our Mutual Friend, the book shows how his serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning and reading founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dickens's serial novels consistently lead readers to reflect on their reading as a form of shared experience, thus channeling their personal memories of Dickens's “unforgettable” scenes and characters into a public reception reaching across social classes. Dickens's celebrity authorship represented both a successful marketing program for popular fiction and a cultural politics addressed to a politically unaffiliated, social-activist Victorian readership. As late-nineteenth-century educational reforms in Britain and the United States consolidated Dickens's heterogeneous constituency of readers into the “mass” populations served by national and state school systems; however, Dickens's beloved novels came to embody the socially inclusive and humanizing goals of democratic education. The book traces how the reading of serial fiction emerged as a widespread practice and a new medium of modern mass culture.Less

Digital Memory and the Archive

Wolfgang Ernst

Jussi Parikka (ed.)

In Ernst’s media theory, archaeology becomes archivological analysis that refuses to stay on the interface level. Instead, it reveals the technological conditions of our contemporary techniques of ... More

In Ernst’s media theory, archaeology becomes archivological analysis that refuses to stay on the interface level. Instead, it reveals the technological conditions of our contemporary techniques of memory and time. The archivological approach focuses on the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. With an extended concept of the archive, a media archaeological and archivological approach to the past means that media can not be made into “historical” objects of research only. Different media systems, from library catalogues to micro-filming, have influenced the content as well as the understanding of the historical remains of the archive itself. Alphabetic writing which has dominated the archive for centuries has dramatically been challenged by signal recording (photography, the phonograph, cinematography) and puzzled the archivists at the beginning of the age of media reproduction. Now, in the digital age, we are faced with further challenges concerning cultural memory, remembering and forgetting. Time is not registered only through historical writing but also through the microtemporality of the machines themselves. Instead of narrative and historical accounts of media history, Archives, Media and Cultural Memory that we need a more medium-specific account of the interaction of past and current media cultures. Media studies is extended into an analysis of their scientific and technological roots, while combining such specificity with exciting insights into contemporary philosophy and media theory.Less

Our Own Image: A Story of a M?ori Filmmaker

Barry Barclay

Acclaimed Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay’s Our Own Image relates the experiences of making his documentaries and his critically acclaimed feature-length film Ngati (1987), widely credited as the first ... More

Acclaimed Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay’s Our Own Image relates the experiences of making his documentaries and his critically acclaimed feature-length film Ngati (1987), widely credited as the first fiction feature by a member of an indigenous community. Barclay details his views on the process of filmmaking within his own Māori community and discusses how his work differed from popular cinema, advocating for indigenous control, participation, and perspectives in media. Our Own Image gives an in-depth depiction of the changes Barclay’s approach contributed to the field of documentaries, as well as displaying the respect for community Barclay brought to his filming technique. His insistence on letting people speak for themselves demonstrated authenticity to audiences, creating awareness of indigenous cinema in New Zealand and worldwide.Less