Over the last half of the twentieth century, television has become the predominant medium through which the public accesses information about the world. Through the news, situation comedies, police dramas, and commercials, we learn about the world around us, and our role within it. These genres, narratives, and cultural forms are not simply entertainment, but powerful socializing agents that show the world as we might never see it in real life. How Television Shapes Our Worldview brings together a diverse set of scholars, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks to interrogate the ways through which television molds our vision of the outside world. The essays include advertising and public relations analyses, audience interviews, and case studies that touch on genres ranging from science fiction in the 1970s to current “reality” television. Television truly provides a powerful influence over how we learn about the world around us and understand its social processes.

This two-volume set LNCS 14025 and 14026 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media, SCSM 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference, HCI International 2023, held in Copenhagen, Denmark in July 2023. The total of 1578 papers and 396 posters included in the HCII 2023 proceedings was carefully reviewed and selected from 7472 submissions. The SCSM 2023 conference offers a wide range of topics related to the design, development, assessment, use, and impact of social media.

This book examines the ethics, politics and aesthetics of veganism in contemporary culture and thought. Traditionally a lifestyle located on the margins of western culture, veganism has now been propelled into the mainstream, and as agribusiness grows animal issues are inextricably linked to environmental impact as well as to existing ethical concerns. This collection connects veganism to a range of topics including gender, sexuality, race, the law and popular culture. It explores how something as basic as one’s food choices continue to impact on the cultural, political, and philosophical discourse of the modern day, and asks whether the normalization of veganism strengthens or detracts from the radical impetus of its politics. With a Foreword by Melanie Joy and Jens Tuidor, this book analyzes the mounting prevalence of veganism as it appears in different cultural shifts and asks how veganism might be rethought and re-practised in the twenty-first century.

This book explores the unique contribution that critical communication studies can bring to our understanding of health. It covers several broad themes: representing and mediating health; marketing and promoting health, co-producing health; and managing health crises and risks. Chapters speak to moral and social regulation through health communication, technologies of health, healthism and governmentality. They engage with historical and contemporary issues, offering readers theoretically grounded perspectives. At base, the book explores what a critical communication approach to health might look like, revealing in important—and sometimes surprising—ways how communication sits at the centre of understanding how health is constructed, contested, and made meaningful.

Ryan Murphy is a self-described "gay boy from Indiana," who has grown up to forge a media empire. With an extraordinary list of credits and successful television shows, movies, and documentaries to his name, Murphy can now boast one of the broadest and most successful careers in Hollywood. Serving as writer, producer, and director, his creative output includes limited-run dramas (such as Feud, Ratched, and Halston), procedural dramas (such as 9-1-1 and 9-1-1 Lonestar), anthology series (such as American Crime Story, American Horror Story, and American Horror Stories), sit-coms (such as The New Normal) and long-running serial narratives (such as Glee, Nip/Tuck, and Pose). Each of these is infused in different ways with a distinctive form of queer energy and erotics, animating their narratives with both campy excess and poignant longing and giving new meaning to the American story. This collection takes up Murphy as auteur and showrunner, considering the gendered and sexual politics of Murphy’s wide body of work. Using an intersectional framework throughout, an impressive list of well-known and emerging scholars engages with Murphy’s diverse output, while also making the case for Murphy’s version of a queer sensibility, a revised notion of queer time, cultural memory, and the contributions his own production company makes to a politics of LGBTQ+ representation and evolving gender identities. This book is suitable for students of Gender and Media, LGBTQ+ Studies, Media Studies, and Communication Studies.

Youth Fiction and Trans Representation is the first book that wholly addresses the growth of trans and gender variant representation in literature, television, and films for children and young adults in the twenty-first century. Ranging across an array of media—including picture books, novels, graphic novels, animated cartoons, and live-action television and feature films—Youth Fiction and Trans Representation examines how youth texts are addressing and contributing to ongoing shifts in understandings of gender in the new millennium. While perhaps once considered inappropriate for youth, and continuing to face backlash, trans and gender variant representation in texts for young people has become more common, which signals changes in understandings of childhood and adolescence, as well as gender expression and identity. Youth Fiction and Trans Representation provides a broad outline of developments in trans and gender variant depictions for young people in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and closely analyzes a series of millennial literary and screen texts to consider how they communicate a range of, often competing, ideas about gender, identity, expression, and embodiment to implied child and adolescent audiences.

First aired in 1989, The Simpsons has become America's most beloved animated show. It changed the world of television, bringing to the screen a cartoon for adults, a sitcom without a laugh track, an imperfect lower class family, a mixture of high and low comedy and satire for the masses. This collection of new essays explores the many ways in which The Simpsons reflects everyday life through its exploration of gender roles, music, death, food politics, science and religion, anxiety, friendship and more.

Covering from 1900 to the present day, this book highlights how female artists, actors, writers, and activists were involved in the fight for women's rights, with a focus on popular culture that includes film, literature, music, television, the news, and online media. Women's Rights: Reflections in Popular Culture offers a succinct yet thorough resource for anyone interested in the relationship between feminism, women's rights, and media. It is ideally suited for students researching popular culture's role in the modern history of women's rights and representation of women, women's rights, and feminism in popular culture. This insightful book highlights of some of the most important moments of women taking a stand for women throughout popular culture history. Each section focuses on an aspect of popular culture. The television section covers important benchmarks, such as Julia, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Roseanne, Murphy Brown, and Ellen. Coverage of films includes Christopher Strong, Foxy Brown, and Thelma & Louise; the literature section features the work of influential individuals such as Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison. The book celebrates early musical ground-breakers like Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith as well as contemporary artists Janelle Monáe and Pussy Riot. The work of key women activists—including Margaret Sanger, Angela Davis, and Winona LaDuke—is recognized, along with the unique ways women have used the power of the web in their continued effort to push for women's equality.

Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Onscreen/Offscreen is an exploration of the politics and being of filmic images. The book examines contestations inside and outside the Tamil film industry over the question "what is an image?" Answers to this question may be found in the ontological politics that take place on film sets, in theatre halls, and in the social fabric of everyday life in South India, from populist electoral politics and the gendering of social space to caste uplift and domination. Bridging and synthesizing linguistic anthropology, film studies, visual studies, and media anthropology, Onscreen/Offscreen rethinks key issues across a number of fields concerned with the semiotic constitution of social life, from the performativity and ontology of images to questions of spectatorship, realism, and presence. In doing so, it offers both a challenge to any approach that would separate image from social context and a new vision for linguistic anthropology beyond the question of "language."

Winner of the 2019 John Leo and Dana Heller Award for the Best Work in LGBTQ Studies from the PCA The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition. Taking into account elements such as the casting of child actors, the use of and experimentation with plot traditions, the contradictory interpretive valences of comedy, and the subtle subversions of moral standards by writers and directors, Pugh points out how innocence and sexuality conflict on television. As older sitcoms often sit on a pedestal of nostalgia as representative of the Golden Age of the American Family, television history reveals a deeper, queerer vision of family bonds. Download open access ebook here.