This book reconsiders media studies from different philosophical and theoretical perspectives from around the world. It brings together diverse views and visions from thinkers such as Sr Aubrobindo, Jurgen Habermas, Paul Ricoeur, Pope Francis, and Satyajit Ray, among others. The authors focus on the issues of ethics, aesthetics, meditation, and communication in relation to media studies and explore the links between media and mindfulness. The volume includes case studies from India, United States, Switzerland, and Denmark and presents empirical works on new horizons of critical media studies in different fields such as American news media and creative media lab. A unique contribution, this book will be indispensable for students and researchers of journalism, communication studies, social media, behavioural sciences, sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, and development studies.

This book offers an important reconsideration of teaching, learning and research in media studies, and provides an overview of some of the key issues, controversies and debates in the field. It argues that, in spite of critical interventions from scholars working both within and outside of media studies, many academics have been slow to respond to the ongoing shifts and transformations in digital media in terms of curriculum design and course content. The book critically engages with and reassesses issues and debates in teaching and learning in the field of media studies in light of wide-scale shifts incurred by digital media, and asks “is media studies still relevant as a subject in its current form?” This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, media education, cultural studies and popular culture.

Leading scholars of media and public life grapple with how to make sense of major transformations rocking media and politics.

This book links the growing connections between media, culture and religion into a coherent theoretical whole. It examines, amongst others, the effect on cultural practices and the increasing autonomy and individualized practice of religion.

This collection discusses and analyzes the efficacy of media education around the world, paying particular attention to whether and how it improves the critical thinking skills of students. Many books describe the importance of media education, but few evaluate its effectiveness. Implicit is a belief that without a thorough understanding of the extent to which media education achieves its aims, or fails to do so, its potential cannot be fulfilled.

The essays in Rethinking Media Change center on a variety of media forms at moments of disruption and cultural transformation. The editors' introduction sketches an aesthetics of media transition—patterns of development and social dispersion that operate across eras, media forms, and cultures. The book includes case studies of such earlier media as the book, the phonograph, early cinema, and television. It also examines contemporary digital forms, exploring their promise and strangeness. A final section probes aspects of visual culture in such environments as the evolving museum, movie spectaculars, and "the virtual window." The contributors reject apocalyptic scenarios of media revolution, demonstrating instead that media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, an accretive process in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.

Who creates the cultural landscape we experience? When we watch the evening news, are we receiving unrevised information straight from the day's headlines or is it positioned in such a way as to 'manufacture consent, ' as Chomsky put it? These are just two of the fascinating questions posed by the authors of this collection as they develop a new form of media literacy that encourages students to become critical readers of the media that attempts to shape their experience. This is an intriguing and wide-ranging critique that makes the perfect text for a variety of courses including curriculum studies, critical pedagogy, media studies, cultural studies and political science