Our Books - Ideas That Shape Scholarship

'The Gendered Self: LGBTQ+ Narratives in Global Media, Volume II' challenges the restrictive frameworks that have long defined gender and sexuality. Moving beyond simplistic dichotomies, this volume explores how LGBTQ+ identities are shaped, represented, and contested across diverse cultural, historical, and political contexts. Through case studies from Turkey, the United States, China, and India, contributors reveal the lived complexities of queer experience. Chapters trace transgender journeys of identity transformation, dissect the weaponization of queer bodies in moral panics, and analyze the digital self-representations of Chinese gay men. Others investigate how Indian OTT platforms and Malayalam cinema expand space for queer narratives, while historical accounts of activists like Paula Grossman illustrate the fraught relationship between representation, activism, and backlash. Across these explorations, the volume highlights how media, politics, and cultural traditions simultaneously affirm and erase queer lives. It uncovers the deep roots of erasure in mythology and religion, while also showing how digital platforms and popular culture create new opportunities for resistance and recognition. This collection insists that the “gendered self” must be understood as fluid, intersectional, and culturally situated, pushing readers to reimagine identity beyond binaries and toward broader visions of inclusion and justice.

'The Gendered Self: LGBTQ+ Narratives in Global Media, Volume I' explores how media serves as a powerful arena for visibility, identity formation, and social change. Across global contexts, the chapters uncover how LGBTQ+ lives are framed, celebrated, silenced, or contested in television, film, news, advertising, and digital platforms. Contributors examine themes such as queer infrastructures in cinema, televised celebrations that disrupt tradition, the erasure and recovery of queer histories, and the lived experiences of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Māhū identities. Other chapters address the role of international law in shaping sexual rights, the tensions of representation in Muslim-majority societies, and the ways advertising and talk shows negotiate inclusivity. The volume concludes with a critique of how sitcoms both challenge and reassert patriarchal masculinity. The collection highlights that representation is never neutral. Media can validate identities, expand imaginaries, and amplify marginalized voices, yet it can also perpetuate stereotypes, erase histories, and reinforce exclusion. This volume brings these tensions into focus, revealing how the gendered self emerges at the intersection of culture, politics, and storytelling, and why media remains central to the global struggle for equality.

'Queer Representation in Literature and Culture' offers a timely and critical exploration of how queerness is depicted, negotiated, and resisted across diverse literary and cultural texts. Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, the volume examines queer identities, desires, and politics through the lenses of decoloniality, and intersectionality. With contributions that span literature, cinema, digital media, and popular culture, this book foregrounds voices and narratives that challenge heteronormative, and patriarchal frameworks. Accessible yet scholarly, it is an essential resource for those interested in the intersections of gender, sexuality, culture, and power in contemporary discourse.

The twenty-first century is increasingly shaped by communications and media innovations. Societies and economies are now highly mediatised and digitised, like never before. There are phenomena changes in the ways global citizens communicate and interact. The era is one in which the mass media industries are highly disrupted. With mediatisation, digitalisation and audience participation in public sphere, old theories, concepts, curricula and pedagogy of communication and media studies are increasingly put to the test. Within this context, there is a paradigm shift from Mass Communication as a discipline to Communication and Media Studies, along with other highly specialised yet interrelated disciplines, taking into consideration the ongoing digital revolution harbingered by globalisation and contemporary Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). This has created the need for new instructional and reading materials relevant for use by stakeholders in tertiary educational system in Nigeria. Accordingly, 'Issues in Contemporary Journalism Education and Practice in Nigeria' is a timely and most adequate response to address the felt needs of teachers and learners in universities and colleges globally.

The extant scholarship of the rape-revenge narrative has frequently either upheld this narrative form’s feminist bonafides (Clover) or condemned it as misogynistic (Creed). In this volume, West argues that these competing camps of thought have largely elided rape-revenge’s inherent ambivalence, which stems from the paradoxical role disgust plays in rape-revenge texts. That is, disgust is essential for portraying rape as the horrific act it is, but employing disgust in a rape-revenge text risks alienating audiences. To explore this issue, Brandon West first shows the strengths and pitfalls of different methods rape-revenge auteurs have used to approach this disturbing narrative form. Showing rape and revenge in graphic detail has well-documented issues in the scholarship, but the author shows how texts that eschew such graphic portrayals also have their own consequent weaknesses. Thereafter, West articulates the paradox of disgust so he can isolate this key issue hounding these texts and analyses thereof. Then, West shows how disgust plays multiple roles in these texts, roles that make the paradox more challenging to resolve. To this end, the book shows disgust not only risks alienating audiences but also forms part of the pleasure these texts offer audiences. And so, West enumerates the possible pleasures of disgust. Finally, this book pulls these threads together to examine a couple of final rape-revenge texts, one of which, 2017’s 'Revenge', West argues, is the most successful anti-rape narrative discussed in this volume because of the balance it strikes between evoking disgust and avoiding alienating audiences.

This reader is the first comprehensive look at representations of race, gender, disability, body size, age, and sexuality in US entertainment media. The “bible” of media representation, it weaves contemporary media examples together with quantitative data and qualitative case studies in a way that is accessible to students, industry insiders, and media advocates. Using over twenty publicly available reports and datasets, the authors provide the most detailed picture to date of how different groups have historically been erased and misrepresented in film and television. This book should be on the shelf of every person who seeks to understand the significance of media inclusion for the advancement of traditionally marginalized groups in the US.

In a country where the richness of diverse cultures is often overshadowed by historical conflicts, this book delves into the complex relationship between the so-called “center” and “periphery” within Spain’s borders. Traditionally, the center has symbolized Castilian identity, while the periphery encompassed other regional cultures. But in today’s rapidly evolving social landscape, what do these terms really mean? This groundbreaking work reexamines the “center vs. periphery” paradigm through the lens of contemporary Spanish literature, cinema, and media. It poses critical questions about the existence and nature of a unified Spanish identity and investigates whether the tension between these cultural spheres persists. The book also challenges readers to consider which aspects—linguistic, gender, or other forms of identity—play the most significant role in this dynamic. Furthermore, it scrutinizes whether marginalized groups such as BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and differently-abled communities are relegated to the periphery in modern Spain. With no other published work focusing on these issues in 21st-century Spain, this book offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on cultural tensions that have shaped and continue to shape the nation. Its innovative approach makes it an indispensable reference for researchers and students in gender and women’s studies, Queer studies, media studies, Spanish literature, and language, as well as those exploring nationalism, separatism, race, and Blackness.

This volume shows that the cultural production of nostalgia is a major tool for structuring feelings of resentment and anxiety. The current volume is concerned with collective nostalgia as it has been elicited, channeled, and weaponized by media production agents. The book aims to analyze how the performing arts and media (music, cinema, TV, etc.) generate and shape the feeling of collective nostalgia. It shows how the cultural production of nostalgia reflects distinct social-political contexts and serves particular political purposes. The collective monograph prioritizes cases from the post-Soviet context. However, the authors do not argue that the collapse of the socialist bloc in general, and the USSR in particular, has established some unique nostalgic precedent. The book claims that mechanisms of producing nostalgia and marshaling it for political purposes are broadly similar in most (modern or postmodern) settings. It is not our intent to demonize Russia, nor do we want Russia to be our dominant frame of reference, even if, in most of our cases here, 'nolens volens' appeared first in Russia-centric post-Soviet discourse. The “Russian bloc” has been placed in the second part of the book in order to give primacy to non-Russian subjects.

The adverse societal impacts of social media platforms comprise a subject of global concern, given that this digital technology has become a breeding ground for the manifestation of varied forms of online harassment and abuse. Yet, most studies exploring this phenomenon have done so predominantly in Anglophone social contexts (notably, the US and the UK). Thus, the present work examines hate speech and abusive behaviour adopting an innovative cross-cultural perspective. To this end, the book analyses a sample of 108 scholarly papers originally published in three non-hegemonic languages (Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish) and encompassing 11 countries (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, and Spain). In this context, the development of this study highlights the relevance of considering cultural, historical and linguistic factors when analysing hate speech and abusive behaviour on social media. By confronting and evaluating findings from different countries and languages, the study sheds light on how cultural norms and language use shape the manifestation and impact of online harassment and abuse. Besides, the study also reveals that social media plays the pivotal dual role of catalyst and vehicle for disseminating hate and abuse. As such, they can bring a series of adverse societal impacts upon individuals, vulnerable social groups, society, and democracy. Ultimately, social media platforms allow offenders the capability to unleash and disseminate aggressive and discriminatory ideologies, attracting numerous like-minded people to subvert and disregard any social convention constraints and norms of conviviality. Consequently, one of social media’s most significant negative impacts is the undermining of social cohesion. Therefore, the present book is of interest to students, established scholars, and researchers in various disciplines, including sociology, criminology, media and communication studies, and digital humanities. Moreover, it is recommended reading for policymakers, leaders of non-governmental organisations, educators, journalists, and anyone interested in learning more about social media’s impacts on people’s lives.