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The monograph is focused on three essential research problems identified by the key terms used in its title. The analysis covers concepts that previously were not subject to in-depth research projects: the MediaPolis, a MediaEgo and evolution of the political communication paradigm, observed and analysed on the political scene in Poland. Evolution of the public sphere and the media requires consideration of the causes of ongoing changes and of forecast transformations initiated by those changes. Hence, the research project focused on the sphere that emerged in an intersection of known discourse areas – public, political, meta-political and media discourses. The monograph summarizes years of research into the proposed concepts of a MediaEgo politician and the MediaPolis public sphere.

Although the American Civil War has received extensive scholarly attention in the 150+ years since its conclusion, far less scholarly work has been devoted to western newspapers and their experiences of that bloody conflict. This first volume of a two-volume set reveals that the West was not immune from the war’s battles, military recruitment, national anxieties, or partisan infighting. The Western Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War explores how editors throughout the region (from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast) responded to secession, the war, and its immediate aftermath. This edited volume examines editors’ outspoken partisanship (including political feuds), their newsgathering techniques, their financial concerns, and their responses to wartime press censorship. The book also reveals how the war was reported in the western press, while also casting a light on reporting of home front issues. This first volume reveals the financial and editorial lengths that editors went to in order to meet readers’ demands for war and home front news across a vast region where infrastructure was poor and news, therefore, was often slow to arrive.

This book challenges white and Western feminist approaches to embodied politics, or the use of the body in everyday enactments of resistance, while mapping transgressive performances of femininities by the funkeiras, marginalized women and transfeminine people of color artists in Brazilian favela funk. Often studied from a white feminist perspective, embodied politics reflects debates about agency and structural change that are generally applicable to white women in the West. Concurrently, studies of femininity tend to universalize experiences of gender oppression encountered by white women to women across the globe. In this work, the author offers a transnational perspective on the performative force of embodied politics as a possible means to disrupt white, classist heteropatriarchal structures that oppress particularly poor women and transfeminine people of color in Brazil. This project has a threefold goal: first, it challenges the theoretical shortcomings of white feminist approaches to embodied politics, providing instead a transfeminista take on the concept. Secondly, this project aims to shed light on how traditional methodological approaches have hindered nuanced understandings of women and people of color and their performances. Third and finally, by challenging and re-envisioning the potential of embodied politics from a transnational perspective, the text intends to contribute to the field of critical intercultural communication’s growing but still limited research around bodies and performance, especially of those who are marginalized in global contexts.

Twenty-five years have elapsed since apartheid’s end and South Africa is in a state of emergency. The Black majority are landless and without basic amenities. According to a World Bank report, inequality has increased since apartheid’s end. The charismatic Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader, Julius Malema says, “the time for reconciliation is over, now is the time for justice,” and he has captivated the minds of South African youth. The EFF was the only top political party to increase its voter base in the 2019 South African general elections, and its core voters were young people, restless for change. The EFF is a protest movement, representative of an international trend among the youth, who are using social media to protest. The EFF’s pillars have emerged from a clarion call among the youth for their liberation. Malema says the EFF is the “true inheritor of the ANC’s radical agenda,” as he vows to fight corruption in South Africa, striking fear in the hearts of the white monopoly capitalists and their conspirators. In addition, Malema’s agitational rhetoric is investigated in the first rhetorical study on his discourse, and the results are fascinating. At its core, this struggle among the generations, is for the future direction of South Africa. So, the South African youth are singing struggle songs and toyi-toying, wearing red berets, attentively listening to their command team, holding up their election manifesto called a gun, and are equipped now for the legislative battles for economic freedom in their lifetime.

Pensar el estudio de la comunicación como una "guerra" implica reconocer que este no es un campo de estudio delimitado por una sola disciplina o una estricta definición del concepto "comunicación". Exige, también, identificar diversas tradiciones de investigación, así como explorar los principales dilemas que han guiado varias disciplinas en distintas épocas históricas y latitudes del mundo. Esta colección de tres volúmenes propone, entonces, analizar la comunicación y los medios desde muy diversas trincheras. Estos diversos panoramas, enfoques, tradiciones, épocas, escuelas, autores y sus preocupaciones dialogan entre sí. No hay consensos definitivos; pero tampoco perdedores o ganadores en el debate. La "guerra" consiste pues, en identificar lo que está en juego; reconocer la diversidad de opiniones e intereses, y; considerar el vasto arsenal disponible para resolver los grandes dilemas de la comunicación.

Volumen I. Enfoques disciplinarios

Este primer volumen de La comunicación y sus guerras teóricas. Introducción a las teorías de la comunicación y los medios revisa los principales enfoques disciplinarios: sus supuestos, alcances y límites, así como las propuestas generales de los diversos cristales desde los que se mira este complejo campo de estudio. "Y es que en el mundo traidor", dicta el verso, "no hay ni verdad ni mentira: todo es según el color del cristal con que se mira". Este volumen presenta algunas (im)precisiones necesarias, al tiempo que propone un mapa tentativo para navegar en esta muy variada área de estudio. El recorrido comienza por el enfoque tradicional de la sociología invitándonos a cuestionar el determinismo tecnológico que constantemente amenaza el estudio de la comunicación y los medios. Otros "cristales" como el enfoque normativo, el cultural, el afectivo, el biológico, el económico, el digital o el político complementan esta revisión crítica a través de las plumas de los grandes expertos de cada mirada.

In a unique, and at times highly polemical way, the author demonstrates how the media generally influences thinking and what kind of content they put into peoples’ heads. He aims to encourage a better understanding of oneself, one’s environment, and the world but above all, a better understanding of freedom, the condition of democracy - or dictatorship. This is probably the first book in the media and communication studies which, through scientific provocation, makes the readers delve deeply into their intelligence, teaches them how to use it, and allows them to decide whether they have a weak, average, or insightful mind. The book sets one of the most important trends: it tells how the media think and how they shape their audiences.

Today, the world is facing climate change, wealth inequality, housing crises, food shortages, mass migration, and now a global health pandemic. Cities are at the heart of both these problems and their solutions. Urban communication scholars are well-poised to examine the change initiatives that are both caused and inspired by such complex problems. This volume provides a collection of urban communication research focused on how examining change through the lens of communication provides unique processual understandings of cities as dynamic sites formed through the interplay between concrete cases and conceptual ideas. The first section, Change through Institutional Intervention, addresses how diverse societal institutions—including policy, regulation, planning, and voluntary arts—interplay with changes in our urban communities. The second section, Change in Place and through Space, explores various ways in which spaces and places are able to transform through communicative practice, specifically focusing on how space and place provide unique frames for communicating change and influencing interaction in cities. The third section, Change through Participation and Engagement, collectively draws attention to the ways that public participation and engagement are utilized in cities in ways that enhance the communication both within and about them, focusing specifically on how this happens globally in teaching and learning environments, community planning partnerships, industrial site redevelopment projects, and approaches to food sovereignty in urban agricultural initiatives.

Collective remembering is an important way that communities name and make sense of the past. Places and stories about the past influence how communities remember the past, how they try to preserve it, or in some cases how they try to erase it. The research in this book offers key insights into how places and memories intersect with intercultural conflicts, oppressions, and struggles by which communities make sense of, deal with, and reconcile the past. The authors in this book examine fascinating stories from important sites—such as international commemorations of Korean “Comfort Women,” a film representation of the Stonewall Riots, and remembrances of the post-communist state in Albania. By utilizing various critical and cultural studies and ethnographic and narrative-based methods, each chapter examines cultural memory in intercultural encounters, everyday experiences, and identity performances that evoke collective memories of colonial pasts, immigration processes, and memories of places and spaces that are shaped by power structures and clashing ideologies. This book is essential reading for understanding the links between space/place and cultural memory, memories of nationally, and places constituted by markers of ethnicity, race, and sexuality. These readings are especially useful in courses in intercultural communication, cultural studies, international studies, and peace and conflict studies.

Social sciences are made up of science disciplines that research humanity, society, and the world with a human dimension, and therefore its domain of influence is also serious and wide. Naturally, the social scientist has the power to influence society with his/her research and writing. This book aims to add the contributions of academicians from different disciplines to the social sciences fields they specialize in the academic literature and to give an idea about new researches. The book contains scientific articles on business, economics, public finance, tourism, and international relations.