This is the first comprehensive text on social psychological approaches to communication, providing an excellent introduction to theoretical perspectives, special topics, and applied areas and practice in communication. Bringing together scholars of international reputation, this book provides a unique contribution to the field.

Today, students are more familiar with other cultures than ever before because of the media, Internet, local diversity, and their own travels abroad. Using a social constructionist framework, Inter/Cultural Communication provides today's students with a rich understanding of how culture and communication affect and effect each other. Weaving multiple approaches together to provide a comprehensive understanding of and appreciation for the diversity of cultural and intercultural communication, this text helps students become more aware of their own identities and how powerful their identities can be in facilitating change—both in their own lives and in the lives of others.

Gunther Kress, a pioneer in the field of multimodality and the co-author of the bestselling Reading Images, produces a comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of the topic providing sample analyses and suggestions for further reading.

This broad-ranging text offers a comprehensive outline of how visual images, language and discourse work as `systems of representation'. Individual chapters explore: representation as a signifying practice in a rich diversity of social contexts and institutional sites; the use of photography in the construction of national identity and culture; other cultures in ethnographic museums; fantasies of the racialized `Other' in popular media, film and image; the construction of masculine identities in discourses of consumer culture and advertising; and the gendering of narratives in television soap operas.

"This is an extraordinarily lucid book. I am not sure that there is anyone who can do this sort of thing better than Jen Webb. It is a gift to students; extremely accessible yet complex and sophisticated in its treatment of theories and concepts of representation." - Jim McGuigan, Loughborough University Understanding Representation offers a contemporary, coherent and genuinely interdisciplinary introduction to the concept of representation. Drawing together the full range of ideas, practices, techniques and disciplines associated with the subject, this book locates them in a historical context, presents them in a readable fashion, and shows their relevance to everyday life in an engaging and accessible manner. Readers will be shown how to develop a sophisticated attitude to meaning, and understand the relationship to truth and identity that is brought into focus by communicative practices. With chapters on linguistic and political representation, art and media, and philosophical and cognitive approaches, this book: Guides readers through complex theoretical terrain with a highly readable and refreshing writing style. Explains the techniques and perspectives offered by semiotics, discourse analysis, poetics, politics, narratology, visual culture, cognitive theory, performance theory and theories of embodied subjectivity. Covers the new ideas and practices that have emerged since the work of Barthes, Eco and Foucault - especially communication and meaning-making in the digital environment, and the new paradigms of understanding associated with cognitive theories of identity and language. Teaches readers how to interpret and interrogate the world of signs in which they live. Understanding Representation provides students across the social sciences and humanities with an invaluable introduction to what is meant by ′representation′.

Image and Representation is a clear and straight-talking introduction to two of the most important concepts in film and media studies. Exploring media language and representation throughout a variety of visual texts, the book offers a balanced, in-depth guide to the essential theories and key issues. The book begins by introducing the basic components of image analysis, including mise en scene, framing and anchorage. It then elaborates on these key ideas to provide the reader with a more advanced understanding of media language and representation. From the contribution of semiotics and debates around authorial intent, to ideas about hegemony and issues around propaganda, Nick Lacey offers approachable explanations of complex ideas and terms. The new edition is also now updated to reflect recent changes in the field, with particular attention paid to new media technologies. Each chapter is packed with memorable examples from a wider range of media and provides greater global perspective on today's media landscape. Gradually building up the reader's knowledge to encourage independent thinking, this is an essential resource for students taking courses in media, cultural, communication and film studies at school, college or university.

This book is a clear, systematic, original and lively account of how media representations shape the way we see our and others’ lives in a global age. It provides in-depth analysis of a range of international media representations of disaster, war, conflict, migration and celebration. The book explores how images, stories and voices, on television, the Internet, and in advertisements and newspapers, invite us to relocate to distant contexts, and to relate to people who are remote from our daily lives, by developing ‘mediated intimacy’ and focusing on the self. It also explores how these representations shape our self-narratives. Orgad examines five sites of media representation – the other, the nation, possible lives, the world and the self. She argues that representations can and should contribute to fostering more ambivalence and complexity in how we think and feel about the world, our place in it and our relation to far-away others. Media Representations and the Global Imagination will be of particular interest to students and scholars of media and cultural studies, as well as sociology, politics, international relations, development studies and migration studies.