Engaging Film is a creative, interdisciplinary volume that explores the engagements among film, space, and identity and features a section on the use of films in the classroom as a critical pedagogical tool. Focusing on anti-essentialist themes in films and film production, this book examines how social and spatial identities are produced (or dissolved) in films and how mobility is used to create different experiences of time and space. From popular movies such as 'Pulp Fiction,' 'Bulworth,' 'Terminator 2,' and 'The Crying Game' to home movies and avant-garde films, the analyses and teaching methods in this collection will engage students and researchers in film and media studies, cultural geography, social theory, and cultural studies.

Characters - those fictional agents populating the fictional worlds we spend so much time absorbed in - are ubiquitous in our lives. We track their fortunes, judge their actions, and respond to them with anger, amusement, and affection - indeed the whole palette of human emotions. Powerfully drawn characters transcend their stories, entering into our imaginations and deliberations about the actual world, acting as analogies and points of reference. And yet there has been remarkably little sustained and systematic reflection on these creatures that absorb so much of our attention and emotional lives. In Engaging Characters, Murray Smith sets out a comprehensive analysis of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. Smith's analysis focuses on film, and also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new and social media. At the heart of this account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Teasing out the various dimensions of character, Smith explores the means by which films draw us close to characters, or hold us at a distance from them, and how our beliefs and attitudes are formed and sometimes reformed by these encounters. Integrating these arguments with research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology, Engaging Characters advances an account of the nature of fictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience. In this revised, twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Engaging Characters, Smith refines and extends the arguments of the first edition, with a substantial new introduction reviewing the debates on emotion, empathy, and film spectatorship that the book has inspired.

Reading films, television dramas, reality shows, and virtual exhibits, among other popular texts, Engaging the Past examines the making and meaning of history for everyday viewers. Contemporary media can encourage complex interactions with the past that have far-reaching consequences for history and politics. Viewers experience these representations personally, cognitively, and bodily, but, as this book reveals, not just by identifying with the characters portrayed. Some of the works considered in this volume include the films Hotel Rwanda (2004), Good Night and Good Luck (2005), and Milk (2008); the television dramas Deadwood, Mad Men, and Rome; the reality shows Frontier House, Colonial House, and Texas Ranch House; and The Secret Annex Online, accessed through the Anne Frank House website, and the Kristallnacht exhibit, accessed through the Unites States Holocaust Museum website. These mass cultural texts cultivate what Alison Landsberg calls an "affective engagement" with the past, tying the viewer to an event or person and fostering a sense of intimacy that does more than transport the viewer back in time. Affect, she suggests, can also work to disorient the viewer, forcibly pushing him or her out of the narrative and back into his or her own body. By analyzing these specific popular history formats, Landsberg shows the unique way they provoke historical thinking and produce historical knowledge, prompting a reconsideration of what constitutes history and an understanding of how history works in the contemporary mediated public sphere.

Noël Carroll, a brilliant and provocative philosopher of film, has gathered in this book eighteen of his most recent essays on cinema and television—what Carroll calls “moving images.” The essays discuss topics in philosophy, film theory, and film criticism. Drawing on concepts from cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy, Carroll examines a wide range of fascinating topics. These include film attention, the emotional address of the moving image, film and racism, the nature and epistemology of documentary film, the moral status of television, the concept of film style, the foundations of film evaluation, the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, the ideology of the professional western, and films by Sergei Eisenstein and Yvonne Rainer. Carroll also assesses the state of contemporary film theory and speculates on its prospects. The book continues many of the themes of Carroll’s earlier work Theorizing the Moving Image and develops them in new directions. A general introduction by George Wilson situates Carroll’s essays in relation to his view of moving-image studies.

In many parts of the contemporary world, spirit beliefs and practices have taken on a pivotal role in addressing the discontinuities and uncertainties of modern life. The myriad ways in which devotees engage the spirit world show the tremendous creative potential of these practices and their innate adaptability to changing times and circumstances. Through in-depth anthropological case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, the contributors to this book investigate the role and impact of different social, political, and economic dynamics in the reconfiguration of local spirit worlds in modern Southeast Asia. Their findings contribute to the re-enchantment debate by revealing that the “spirited modernities” that have emerged in the process not only embody a distinct feature of the contemporary moment, but also invite a critical rethinking of the concept of modernity itself.

Engaging Native American Publics considers the increasing influence of Indigenous groups as key audiences, collaborators, and authors with regards to their own linguistic documentation and representation. The chapters critically examine a variety of North American case studies to reflect on the forms and effects of new collaborations between language researchers and Indigenous communities, as well as the types and uses of products that emerge with notions of cultural maintenance and linguistic revitalization in mind. In assessing the nature and degree of change from an early period of "salvage" research to a period of greater Indigenous "self-determination," the volume addresses whether increased empowerment and accountability has truly transformed the terms of engagement and what the implications for the future might be.

Examining rhetorical engagement with difficult topics Museums offer an opportunity to reenvision rhetorical education through their address of hard, discomforting histories that challenge visitors to confront traumatic events and work toward a better future. While both museum studies and rhetoric center the audience in their scholarship and practices, this volume engages across and between these disciplines, allowing for a fuller theorization and enactment of rhetorical education’s connections to social justice. Engaging Museums works to fill gaps between the fields of rhetoric and social justice by going beyond classrooms to sites of public memory represented in museums. This volume presents three distinct, diverse case studies of recently established historical museums taking on the rhetorically complex tasks of representing traumatic events: the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the National World War I Museum, and the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. Through rhetorical and comparative analysis of data collected from the museums and intersectional transdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter theorizes aspects of rhetoric—namely identification, collectivity, and memory—bringing rhetorical theory more firmly into current conversations surrounding civic engagement and social justice. Obermark’s weave of voices and perspectives concludes with a critical focus on how memory may serve as a generative pedagogical topos for both public rhetoric and university-based rhetoric and writing classrooms. This book helps scholars, students, and teachers bring what museums do—difficult, complicated pedagogical work representing hard history—back inside the classroom and further into our civic discourse.

This book offers a new, interdisciplinary model for understanding audience engagement as a type of behaviour, a form of response and a cost to audiences that, combined, offer value to the screen industries. Audience ‘engagement’ has become the key priority of the screen industries. Understanding Engagement in Transmedia Culture explicitly asks what audiences and screen practitioners mean when they say content is ‘engaging’ and uses audience focus groups and practitioner interviews to offer a model for understanding the relationship between the screen industry, the content it produces and its audiences. In particular, the model addresses engagement within transmedia culture. As digital screen technologies proliferate, audiences move seamlessly across and between different devices, content formats and distribution platforms, blurring the boundaries between film, television and videogames. This book offers a way of understanding audience engagement that is not restricted to a single media but instead accounts for and adapts to the various ways in which screen content is experienced. Offering a unique approach by presenting practitioner and audience perspectives, it is perfect for students and scholars working in film and television studies, as well as media industries and audience studies.

This Companion provides an authoritative source for scholars and students of the nascent field of media geography. While it has deep roots in the wider discipline, the consolidation of media geography has started only in the past decade, with the creation of media geography’s first dedicated journal, Aether, as well as the publication of the sub-discipline’s first textbook. However, at present there is no other work which provides a comprehensive overview and grounding. By indicating the sub-discipline’s evolution and hinting at its future, this volume not only serves to encapsulate what geographers have learned about media but also will help to set the agenda for expanding this type of interdisciplinary exploration. The contributors-leading scholars in this field, including Stuart Aitken, Deborah Dixon, Derek McCormack, Barney Warf, and Matthew Zook-not only review the existing literature within the remit of their chapters, but also articulate arguments about where the future might take media geography scholarship. The volume is not simply a collection of individual offerings, but has afforded an opportunity to exchange ideas about media geography, with contributors making connections between chapters and developing common themes.

Journalists are responsible for ensuring that the visuals used in their storytelling accurately represent the facts and events being re-ported. The visuals should align with the truth of the story and not distort or manipulate the information being conveyed. This responsi-bility includes presenting visuals in their original context and avoiding misleading edits or alterations that could misrepresent the truth or sensationalize a story for dramatic effect.