Deborah Jaramillo engages with Emma Louise Briant's new book, Propaganda and Counter-terrorism: Strategies for Global Change, to explore how the prickly world of government propagandists lends critical context to television representations of espionage and the War on Terror.
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TV and the Propaganda Crisis
Report from GeekyCon, Orlando, July 30-August 2: The Challenges of Rebranding a Feminist Con
The newly rebranded GeekyCon fan convention struggles to reconcile commerce and community, negotiate the inclusion of more white (cis) men in a heretofore female/queer environment, and create a "positive" fan environment that still leaves room for dissent.
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A Very Uneasy Death: Social Media and Cecil the Lion
The reactions to Cecil the Lion's murder on social media illustrates how it is not only possible but essential to fight for justice and against exploitation on multiple fronts.
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In Memoriam: Peg Lynch and Her Records of Broadcast History
Peg Lynch, creator and star of Ethel and Albert, recently passed away at the age of 98. Her contributions to radio and early television may not be well known, but materially this forgotten show exists.
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Considering Kids’ Media: Call for Papers for Issue #78 of Velvet Light Trap
On behalf of the coordinating editors for Velvet Light Trap's 78th issue, Caroline Ferris Leader outlines the call for investigating children's media.
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James Bond: A Transmedia Anomaly?
Like time's arrow, transmedia franchises move relentlessly forward. Or do they? Matthew Freeman looks at the retro fixation of the transmedia James Bond storyworld as an anomaly in contemporary entertainment’s perpetual present.
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More Than a (Small/White/Cisgender) Woman: Images of Non-Normative Women in Sports
Jennifer Lynn Jones analyzes recent images and discourse on non-normative female athletes in sports media.
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“Something Into Nothing”: On the Materiality of the Broadcast Archive
Laura LaPlaca writes about the material resilience of broadcast history from the perspective of a collector and archivist, discussing the importance of acknowledging the stuff that radio and television leave behind, especially in the face of an overwhelming emphasis on the "ephemerality" of these media.
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The Only Music Podcast: Listening to a New Music Podcast Find its Voice
Brian Fauteux inaugurates our "The Podcast Review" series with an analysis of The Only Music Podcast, a music podcast from Gothenburg, Sweden that offers a refreshing take on the music industries by critically engaging with bi-weekly topics.
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Textual Analysis & Technology: Information Overload, Part II
Kyra Hunting continues her discussion of software options for media textual analysis, suggesting that while there is no single perfect qualitative research software application available, a combination of Filemaker Pro, NVivo, Dedoose, and Cinemetrics has helped her dig more deeply into media texts.
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Public Stadium Financing: The World’s Greatest “Save Our Show” Campaign
Spending public funds on sports stadiums and arenas is just as much about cultural policy as it is economic policy.
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“Any God Worth Believing in Sends You Dudes in Thongs When in Need”: Exploring Women’s Pleasure in Magic Mike XXL
Magic Mike XXL adds new iconography to the intersectionally raced, gendered, and very classed pleasures found within the women's film through its attention to the centrality of women's sexual desires vis-à-vis the deployment of male bodies who serve to maintain that pleasure.
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Call of Parental Duty: Advertising’s New Constructions of Video-Gaming Fathers
Soldiers, survivors, 3 a.m. fathers—Anthony Smith looks at families in recent video-game advertising and finds a "gamer dad" who’s gamer first, dad a distant second (while gamer mom is first and always a mom).
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Textual Analysis & Technology: In Search of a Flexible Solution, Part I
Kyra Hunting discusses how the creative use of open-ended software can serve media scholars — yet the available research software is not yet designed for the diversity of information, multiplicity of data input types, and unique twists and turns that accompanies the study of media texts.
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Crowdfunding: Looking Beyond Kickstarter
Everybody knows about Kickstarter, which is considered to be world’s most popular crowdfunding platform; however, Kickstarter is only one of an estimated number of over 1,000 platforms worldwide. Patryk Galuszka and Blanka Brzozowska look at MegaTotal, a music-oriented platform implementing a significantly different model than Kickstarter.
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Audiovisual Archives and the Context Conundrum
Stephanie Sapienza, Project Manager at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), advocates for why the audio and paper materials of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB)'s radio collection - housed at the University of Maryland and the University of Wisconsin-Madison - need to be integrated online to maximize their usefulness...
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