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What are the consequences of growing up in a datafied world in which social interaction is increasingly dependent on digital media and everyday life is shaped by algorithmic predictions? How is datafication being normalized in children’s everyday life? What are the technologies, contexts and relations that enhance children’s datafication? What are the meanings of data practices for parents, teachers, and children themselves? These are some of the questions that Giovanna Mascheroni and Andra Siibak address in Datafied Childhoods: Data Practices and Imaginaries in children’s lives.

When the data-driven business model emerged twenty years ago, we could not have imagined how pervasive data extraction would have become in the context of everyday life, including the “institutional triangle” of children’s lives (the home, the school, and the playground). Today, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the datafication of everyday life and our reliance on data-relations. Yet, we still know little about the nature, meanings, and consequences of the data practices in which children, and the adults around them, engage. This book tries to fill in this gap in two ways. First, drawing on the authors’ knowledge of children and media studies and their own research on children’s, families’, and teachers’ interactions with multiple technologies (IoT and IoToys, artificial intelligence, algorithms, robots) in different contexts (home, school, and play), it promotes a non-media-centric and child-centered approach. Second, in so doing it encourages further scholarly inquiry into the everyday as the analytical entry point to understand how datafication is transforming parenting, education, childhood, and thereby the children.

This book articulates Jotería Communication Studies as a subdiscipline and as a praxis for resisting multiple forms of oppression by focusing on how everyday performances of identity and culture challenge master narratives of power and control. Although this book is for scholars, artists, and practitioners from communication studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, cultural studies, or even, Latinx and Chicanx studies in education, sociology, history, literature, media, arts, and humanities, this book speaks to and with those nonheteronormative mestizas/os who perform their sexuality and gender in queer practices and communicative forms—Jotería. As a methodological intervention into the study of marginalized and subaltern communities, this book provides research on Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning (GBTQ) Chicano and Latino communities from specific geographic regions of the U.S. Southwest. Utilizing multiple methods, this book provides a cultural map or political snapshot of a particular time and place from a particular point of view or location and generates knowledge that highlights reflexivity, cultural/queer nuances, and decolonial acts of resistance. Specifically, this book locates “theories in the flesh” in the borderlands narratives of Jotería, such as cuentos, pláticas, chismé, testimonio, mitos, and consejos. These theories of power and resistance create knowledge about how Jotería make sense of their own difference, how people interpret their assumed or perceived difference, and ultimately, how difference is managed as an emancipatory tool toward the goal of queer of color world making.

The 1960s (a.k.a. the 60s) remains a terrain of contemporary politics—with the values of period embraced or rejected, as well as differently interpreted. Popular culture is an important means to understand and analyze the political issues and controversies surrounding the 60s—egalitarianism, equality (civil rights, feminism), as well as anti-communism. In important and key instances popular culture (especially Star Trek [1966-1969]) was at the forefront of the progressive politics of the 60s. This book engages and analyzes the ongoing 60s through popular culture. The 60s is a pivotal period in American and world history—as the United States during this time turned away from white supremacy as official ideology. Also, the American public decidedly soured on U.S. military adventurism—as evidenced by broad public opposition to a military draft. Additionally, women (as a result of the feminism of the era) gained greater access to the public sphere and increased personal autonomy—non-discrimination (and anti-harassment) rules, abortion rights, and no fault divorce. Popular culture is philosophically significant because it allows people to cogitate reasons in the world—especially in the social, political realm. The creators of popular culture will often seek to offer the public authentic art, and much of the public seeks out authentic art. This makes American popular culture (in its finer forms) a viable source material about reason in the world.  In this book the author doesn't  seek to deconstruct popular culture; instead, he seeks to identify and analyze the reasons in the world depicted in it.

In The Preamble as Policy: A Guidebook to Governance and Civic Duty the authors show that the Preamble to the Constitution is more than an introduction to the document; it sets the tone for the rest of the document and how it should be viewed and interpreted. It is also a list of goals for a new government and a tool for holding our elected representatives accountable for their efforts on our behalf. The Preamble as Policy looks at the history of the development of the Constitution to show how the Preamble can be used to judge the laws and policies enacted by the federal government. The Preamble as Policy weaves political thought, history, and current events together allowing for examination of an oft forgotten part of the Constitution. It provides a unique framework and firm foundation for class discussions or social interactions about what we have achieved as a nation and where we might have come up short.

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 II. Tradiciones de pensamiento y escuelas

Este segundo volumen de La comunicación y sus guerras teóricas. Introducción a las teorías de la comunicación y los medios analiza y contrasta distintasescuelasde pensamiento comúnmente ancladas en fronteras nacionales: la influencia norteamericana, el pensamiento francés, la Escuela de Frankfurt, los estudios culturales ingleses, la propuesta de la Escuela Invisible, los planteamientos de la escuela canadiense o el enfoque crítico desde América Latina. Estas diversas tradiciones han evolucionado de manera paralela, pero desde trincheras y paradigmas encontrados. Sin embargo, los análisis en este tomo de expertas y expertos en cada tradición de janver que es posible rastrear orígenes e intereses comunes. Y aunque las diferencias siguen siendo evidentes, en la mayoría de los casos residen en aspectos menos visibles como: el régimen político bajo el cual estas escuelas se desarrollan; el interés, el financiamiento e incluso, el impulso que las y los propios académicos dan a algunos temas frente a otros.

Mainstream media offer audiences identities in accordance with certain definitions of “normal behavior” as given in hegemonic discourses. This book explores the hegemonic/normative discourses circulating in the Turkish mainstream media. Such an analysis provides the mental codes and frameworks offered to the ordinary Turkish people “subjected” to the mass media throughout their daily lives. Each chapter employs different methods for discursive analysis and media formats. Since the authors inquire into the socio-political reality and conjunctures upon which these media discourses are constituted, the book offers much to those readers investigating both the Turkish media and the socio-political transformation that took place in Turkey in the past two decades.

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.

The purpose of this book is to understand the nature of social media and the impact they are having on almost all aspects of modern-day existence from family life and social interactions to education and commerce. Just as fish are unaware of the water they swim in and we humans are unaware of the air that we breathe so it is that the users of social media are unaware of the effects of these media and take their existence as a natural part of their environment. The authors make use of Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology approach to understanding media in order to reveal the effects of social media on their users, how they are changing the nature of our social interactions and how we through our interaction with social media have become actual extensions of our social media, the reverse of McLuhan’s notion that media are extensions of mankind.

The authors analyze the major social media apps including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Tinder, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and blogs as well as examining the Splinternet and the social media scene in Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam and the Islamic world. Understanding Social Media studies the impacts of social media monopolies, the nature of advertising and branding in social media apps and the social media front in cyberwarfare and concludes with an analysis of the social media counter revolution waged by players who actually helped to create social media.