The work of cultural and political theorist Stuart Hall, a pioneer of Cultural Studies who passed away in 2014, remains more relevant than ever. In Stuart Hall Lives, scholars engage with Hall’s most enduring essays, including "Encoding/Decoding" and "Notes on Deconstructing the Popular," bringing them into the context of the 21st century. Different chapters consider resistant media consumers, online journalism, debates around the American Confederate flag and rainbow flags, the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, and contemporary moral panics. The book also includes Hall’s important essay on French theorist Louis Althusser, which is introduced here by Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Slack. Finally, two reminiscences by one of Hall’s former colleagues and one of his former students offer wide-ranging reflections on his years as director of Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, and as head of the Department of Sociology at The Open University. Together, the contributions paint a picture of a brilliant theorist whose work and legacy is as vital as ever. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Here, the author assesses our modern book culture by focusing on five key elements including the explosion of retail bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, and the formation of the Oprah Book Club.

An anthology of essays across the broad spectrum of cultural studies with an international lineup of scholars and semioticians from the United States and Italy. Fully illustrated in color with over 100 color plates.

Revisiting Richard Hoggart’s classic work The Uses of Literacy (1957), this book applies Hoggart’s framework to media literacy today, examining media literacy’s various uses, the tensions between them and what this means for people, communities and the contemporary configurations of social class. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart wrote about how his working class community, in the North of England, were at once using the new ‘mass literacy’ for self-improvement, education, social mobility and civic engagement and, at the same time, the powerful were seizing the opportunity also to use this expansion in literacy, through the new popular culture, for commercial and political ends. Working in the intersection between education, cultural studies and literacies, the authors write about media literacy as a contested, under-theorised field through Hoggart’s ‘line of sight’ to provide a perspective on media literacy and working class culture today. This reimagining of a classic work, piercingly relevant to studies of class in Britain in 2019, will be of key interest to scholars in Media Studies, as well as interested readers in Communication Studies, Literacy Studies, Cultural Studies, Politics and Sociology.

Queer Technologies: Affordances, Affect, Ambivalence presents new scholarship that addresses queer media and practices across a wide range of media, including television, music, zines, video games, mobile applications, and online spaces. Contributors engage with critical contemporary concepts such as counterpublics, affect, temporality, non-binary practices, queer technique, and transmediation to productively explore intersections among communication and media studies and cutting-edge queer and transgender theory. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

This is an open access book.According to Castells, power now rests in networks: “the logic of the network is more powerful than the powers of the network” (quoted in Weber, 2002, p. 104) – it is whether nation states or local communities are deeply affected, especially by inclusion in and exclusion from the global networks that structure a various sectors in society at any level. Thus it is also crucial look closely at exclusion from and inclusion in different kinds of social structures where connectivity and access to networks are essential, being aware that people at the bottom are those who, with nothing to offer the network, are excluded. Castells’ arguments shows us how the new forms of network society offer challenges in a way that despite the disappearance of conventional ties, exploitation, marginalization, exclusion and differentiation remain. In what follows, scholarships are invited to build an academic discussion on characterizing the structure and dynamics of societies in the world of the twenty-first century. Thus, scholar may come to look at the meaning of being in a network society by examining the role of network society within the complexity of socio-cultural, political and economic circumstances in strengthening the role of science in overcoming local, national, regional and global problems. But scientific research is also required to identify a wide variety of solutions to societal problems enhanced by the network society, which no longer relate solely to a particular discipline, but are multi- and trans-disciplinary. In addition, recent research has changed the traditional role of academia, demanding more collaboration in the production of science, not only among universities, but also among researchers, social practitioners and policymakers. Considering these issues, the fourth Asia-Pacific Research in Social Sciences and Humanities (APRiSH) will be hosted by the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Indonesia (FISIP UI) in 2019 under the theme The Network Society: Continuity and Change. Scientific inputs from all parts of the world are welcome, academically and practically. Various perspectives, based on mono-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary research are expected to examine the problems and contribute to solutions.