Faculty Bookshelf - Communication
| Title & Authors | Description |
|---|---|
Surveillance Education: Navigating the Conspicuous Absence of Privacy in Schools Allison Butler, Nolan Higdon (Routledge, 2024) | In our era of surveillance capitalism, digital media technologies are ever more intertwined into the educational process. Schools are presented with digital technologies as tools of convenience for gathering and grading student work, as tools of support to foster a more equitable learning environment, and as tools of safety for predicting or preventing violence or monitoring mental, emotional, and physical health. Despite a dearth of evidence to confirm their effectiveness, digital data collection and tracking is often presented as a way to improve educational outcomes and safety. This book challenges these fallacious assumptions and argues that the use of digital media technologies has caused great harm to students by subjecting them to oppressive levels of surveillance, impinging upon their right to privacy, and harvesting their personal data on behalf of Big-Tech. In doing so, the authors draw upon interviews from K–12 and higher education students, teachers, and staff, civil rights and technology lawyers, and educational technological programmers. The authors also provide practical guidance for teachers, administrators, students, and their families seeking to identify and combat surveillance in education. |
Politicians at Night: Interaction and Discourse on the Entertainment-Political Interview Gonen Dori-Hacohen, Eean Grimshaw, and Menno H. Reijven (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) | The book studies the exchanges between presidential candidates and talk show hosts on broadcast late-night shows in the United States. The authors use various language and social interaction frameworks, including membership categorization analysis, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and semiotics. They develop a broad understanding of the Entertainment-Political Interview (EPI) and cultural role. They discuss how politicians use pronouns to achieve inclusion and exclusion. Similarly, the authors demonstrate how and why the hosts ask softball questions. Unlike these two elements that create politics, the authors demonstrate how politicians use stories to present themselves like celebrities. The linking of the politician to entertainment is part of the final argument of the book, where the authors critically examine the EPI as part of a myth since it vacates the politics of its original form while maintaining a façade of politics. |
Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly Emily West (MIT Press, 2022) | Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now, Emily West examines Amazon's consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. |
Soft Power Internationalism: Competing for Cultural Influence in the 21st Century Global Order Burcu Baykurt (Columbia Press, 2021) | This book is a global comparative history of how soft power came to define the interregnum between the celebration of global capitalism in the 1990s and the recent resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism. It brings together case studies from the European Union, China, Brazil, Turkey, and the United States, examining the genealogy of soft power in the Euro-Atlantic and its evolution in the hands of other states seeking to counter U.S. hegemony by nonmilitaristic means. Contributors detail how global and regional powers created a variety of new ways of conducting foreign policy, sometimes to build new solidarities outside Western colonial legacies and sometimes with more self-interested purposes. Offering a critical history of soft power as an intellectual project as well as a diplomatic practice, Soft-Power Internationalism provides new perspectives on the potential and limits of a multilateral liberal global order. |
Key Scholarship in Media Literacy: David Buckingham Allison Butler (Brill, 2021) | Key Scholarship in Media Literacy: David Buckingham focuses on the key contributions of Buckingham’s work over his prolific career, illuminating the advances he made in the field of media literacy education and understandings of young people’s media cultures. Through a close look at Buckingham’s theoretical advancements, contributions to the larger field of media literacy education, and the key strains of his research – how children and young people learn, what they already know about media and pop culture before they enter classrooms, end media content about and for youth – this text delineates Buckingham’s vast bibliography and will be an invaluable resource for anyone curious to know more about children, youth, and media literacy education. |
Quantitative Research Methods in Communication: The Power of Numbers for Social Justice Erica Scharrer and Srividaya Ramasubramanian (Routledge, 2021) | This book illustrates the mechanics and the meaning behind quantitative research methods by illustrating each step in the research design process with research addressing questions of social justice. It provides practical guidance for researchers who wish to engage in the transformation of structures, practices, and understandings in society through community and civic engagement and policy formation. It contains step-by-step guidance in quantitative methods—from conceptualization through all the stages of execution of a study, including providing a detailed guide for statistical analysis—and demonstrates how researchers can engage with social justice issues in systematic, rigorous, ethical, and meaningful ways. |
Communication in Vehicles: Cultural Variability in Speech Systems Donal Carbaugh, Brion Van Over, Ute Winter, Elizabeth Molina-Markham, and Sunny Lie (De Gruyter, 2020) | New technology in vehicles is transforming the way people move around as well as what they do in their vehicles. How does one communicate with an in-car speech system and how does this vary by language or cultural community? This book explores this process by focusing on the communication practices that people engage in when using their in-car systems and when talking about their vehicles with co-passengers. Chapters present a robust theory and methodology for studying communication in cars, how tasks are begun and ended, how people switch between tasks, how non-task talk appears, what ways and styles of communication drivers prefer, and how they expect the system voice to respond, among other things. Particular attention is given to cultural preferences as they are evident in this communication; these preferences are found to ground various trajectories in the use and meaning of in-car communication practices. The book explores these matters with a focus on the United States and Mainland China. Implications are drawn for the design and utilization of in-car communication systems. |
Educating Media Literacy: The Need for Critical Media Literacy in Teacher Education Allison Butler (Brill, 2019) | Educating Media Literacy addresses two separate topics – teacher education and media literacy – and illustrates how they are intertwined: The United States struggles simultaneously with how best to train and retain prospective teachers and how to foster a better understanding of mainstream media. These two struggles can join forces and move towards a solution through the following: The inclusion of critical media literacy in teacher education programs. |
The Routledge Companion to Global Television Shawn Shimpach (Routledge, 2019) | Featuring scholarly perspectives from around the globe and drawing on a legacy of television studies, but with an eye toward the future, this authoritative collection examines both the thoroughly global nature of television and the multiple and varied experiences that constitute television in the twenty-first century. |
Have a new addition to this list? Email mworoner [at] umass [dot] edu (Morgan Woroner) with the details!