This book investigates how contemporary media represent transgender and gender non-conforming people. Authors in this edited collection analyze the most popular films and television shows of all times and find how much (and how little) media portrayals of trans folks have changed or remained stagnant in the past 20 years.

The purpose of this thesis is to take a more profound and nuanced look into the effects of diversity in transmedia storytelling (also known as transmedia narrative or multiplatform storytelling) on society, more specifically, how the representation in these stories affect the minority groups that interact with transmedia. This thesis investigates the depiction of minority groups in transmedia storytelling and the influence of identifiable characters and plotlines. The research and following interviews I have engaged in will encapsulate into a screenplay set in a fictional court that offers the discourse of "forced diversity" within the transmedia narrative: whether or not this exists and is necessary for the success of telling a story across multiple platforms.

Due to the increase in transgender characters in scripted television and film in the 2010s, trans visibility has been presented as a relatively new phenomenon that has positively shifted the cis society’s acceptance of the trans community. This book counters this claim to assert that such representations actually present limited and harmful characterizations, as they have for decades. To do so, this book analyzes transgender narratives in scripted visual media from the 1960s to 2010s across a variety of genres, including independent and mainstream films and television dramatic series and sitcoms, judging not the veracity of such representations per se but dissecting their transphobia as a constant despite relevant shifts that have improved their veracity and variety. Already ingrained with their own ideological expectations, genres shift the framing of the trans character, particularly the relevance of their gender difference for cisgender characters and society. The popularity of trans characters within certain genres also provides a historical lineage that is examined against the progression of transgender rights activism and corresponding transphobic falsehoods, concluding that this popular medium continues to offer a limited and narrow conception of gender, the variability of the transgender experience, and the range of transgender identities.

As media evolves with technological improvement, communication changes alongside it. In particular, storytelling and narrative structure have adapted to the new digital landscape, allowing creators to weave immersive and enticing experiences that captivate viewers. These experiences have great potential in marketing and advertising, but the medium’s methods are so young that their potential and effectiveness is not yet fully understood. Handbook of Research on Transmedia Storytelling, Audience Engagement, and Business Strategies is a collection of innovative research that explores transmedia storytelling and digital marketing strategies in relation to audience engagement. Highlighting a wide range of topics including promotion strategies, business models, and prosumers and influencers, this book is ideally designed for digital creators, advertisers, marketers, consumer analysts, media professionals, entrepreneurs, managers, executives, researchers, academicians, and students.

Stories, whether they are fact or fiction, popular or not, are a proven method of pedagogy. In the age of media convergence and with the advancement of technology, stories have morphed into new forms; however, their core purpose remains the same, which is to pass on knowledge and information. The internet, with its inherent interactivity, and story, with its inherent capacity to engage, can lead to innovative and transformative learning experiences in media-rich environments. This book focuses on web-based Transmedia Storytelling Edutainment (TmSE) as an andragogical practice in higher education. Story is at the forefront of this investigation because narrative is the basis for developing entertainment media franchise that can be incorporated into pedagogical practice. The propulsion of this analysis consists of practice-based research through narrative inquiry and an e-module case study presented on multimedia storytelling in the classroom. A Transmedia Storytelling Framework is provided for creating screenplays for cross-media projects and for analyzing their appropriateness in education. Additionally, a hypertext screenplay, which allowed students to dig deeper into the story word and to build more knowledge, is evaluated for its use in higher education. Since screenplays are by nature writing for the screen, it is believed that the more visual the input, the more likely it is to be memorized and recalled. A link to The Goddess Within screenplay is available for download on the right hand side of this page.

How the blurring of media forms—transmedia—became the default for how we experience narratives, and how that cultural transformation has redefined the worlds of education, entertainment, and our increasingly polarized public discourse. Over the past decade, the power of narrative has been unleashed with awesome and terrifying consequences, and it has been consumed in its blurred media forms by millions of people as news, entertainment, and education. Imagining Transmedia, edited by Ed Finn, Bob Beard, Joey Eschrich, and Ruth Wylie, explores the surprising ways that narratives working across media forms became the default grammar for both media consumption and personal expression and how multiplatform storytelling creates new media literacies and modes of civil discourse. Understanding this shift reveals transmedia as an essential building block of media literacy today. Transmedia is how we create, interpret, and participate in our increasingly mediated society. It extends beyond popular culture into professional and public spheres while, at the same time, it fuels the misinformation and polarization that have contributed to America’s fraying civic discourse. Reaching beyond traditional academic analyses, this probing collection of essays and conversations features transmedia practitioners sharing their experiences and inviting readers to imagine the types of multimodal stories and experiences they might create. Prioritizing conversation over a single unified theory, each section of this volume pairs thematically linked essays from international contributors with a dialogue between authors to create an accessible, practical synthesis of ideas.

Around the globe, people now engage with media content across multiple platforms, following stories, characters, worlds, brands and other information across a spectrum of media channels. This transmedia phenomenon has led to the burgeoning of transmedia studies in media, cultural studies and communication departments across the academy. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies is the definitive volume for scholars and students interested in comprehending all the various aspects of transmediality. This collection, which gathers together original articles by a global roster of contributors from a variety of disciplines, sets out to contextualize, problematize and scrutinize the current status and future directions of transmediality, exploring the industries, arts, practices, cultures, and methodologies of studying convergent media across multiple platforms.