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Mediated Shame of Class and Poverty Across Europe
The key concepts of the book are media, class, poverty, and shaming. The contributors to this book examine how certain social relations and their cultural meanings in the media, namely class and poverty, are transformed into factual or moral attributes of people and situations. Class and poverty are not understood as certain things and actions, or concepts and numbers; both class and poverty are assumed to be, above all, particular social relationships or a set of relations between people, things and symbols. Without denying that contempt for the destitute Other is an affect found throughout history and in various socioeconomic contexts, the chapters in this book – through their concern with the mediated gaze on class – narrate predominantly the challenges brought about by the media’s spectacular take on poverty and low status as they (at least) coincide with the neoliberal era. This volume will be essential reading for the scholars specialising in the study of media and social inequalities form the vantage points of Media Studies, Sociology, Anthropology or European Studies.
The Greengrocer and His TV
The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought an end to the Prague Spring and its promise of "socialism with a human face." Before the invasion, Czech reformers had made unexpected use of television to advance political and social change. In its aftermath, Communist Party leaders employed the medium to achieve "normalization," pitching television stars against political dissidents in a televised spectacle that defined the times. The Greengrocer and His TV offers a new cultural history of communism from the Prague Spring to the Velvet Revolution that reveals how state-endorsed ideologies were played out on television, particularly through soap opera-like serials. In focusing on the small...
Past for the Eyes
How do museums and cinema shape the image of the Communist past in today’s Central and Eastern Europe? This volume is the first systematic analysis of how visual techniques are used to understand and put into context the former regimes. After history “ended” in the Eastern Bloc in 1989, museums and other memorials mushroomed all over the region. These efforts tried both to explain the meaning of this lost history, as well as to shape public opinion on their society’s shared post-war heritage. Museums and films made political use of recollections of the recent past, and employed selected museum, memorial, and media tools and tactics to make its political intent historically credible. Thirteen essays from scholars around the region take a fresh look at the subject as they address the strategies of fashioning popular perceptions of the recent past.
Popular Culture and Subcultures of Czech Post-Socialism
This book draws on wide range of inspirations to provide a well-balanced picture of the popular culture and subcultures of Czech post-socialism. What were the continuities and discontinuities of the post-socialist popular culture, mentalities and society during the period of late state socialism? What were the different mechanisms of ‘creating the Other’ in popular culture and subcultures? This volume shows the diverse trajectories of the late socialist (and older national) cultural practices and the related set of values and beliefs in new transitory circumstances. Whereas many scholars emphasize the tendency to sustain in a more or less adapted form under the new circumstances, the chapters and case studies of this book demonstrate a slightly different, more nuanced development.
Postsocialist Memory in Contemporary German Culture
Scholarship on Eastern Europe after 1989 often focuses narrowly on the socialist past as authoritarian, dictatorial, or totalitarian. This collection, by contrast, illuminates an additional dimension of post-socialist memory: it traces the survival of hopes and dreams born under socialism and the legacy of the unrealized alternative futures embedded within the socialist past. Looking at contemporary German-language literature, film, theater, and art, the volume analyzes reflections on everyday socialist realities as well as narratives of opposition and dissent. The texts discussed here not only revisit the past, but also challenge the present and help us imagine alternative futures. Rather than framing the unrealized futures envisioned in the pre-1989 era as failures, this collection probes post-socialist memory for its future-oriented potential to rethink issues of community, equity and equality, and late-stage capitalism. Foregrounding the complexities of Eastern European legacies also helps us reimagine the relationship between East and West both in Germany and in Europe as a whole.
No Heavenly Bodies
The compelling and little-known history of satellite communications that reveals the Soviet and Eastern European roles in the development of its infrastructure. Taking its title from Hannah Arendt’s description of artificial earth satellites, No Heavenly Bodies explores the history of the first two decades of satellite communications. Christine E. Evans and Lars Lundgren trace how satellite communications infrastructure was imagined, negotiated, and built across the Earth’s surface, including across the Iron Curtain. While the United States’ and European countries’ roles in satellite communications are well documented, Evans and Lundgren delve deep into the role the Soviet Union and ...
The International History of Communication Study
The International History of Communication Study maps the growth of media and communication studies around the world. Drawing out transnational flows of ideas, institutions, publications, and people, it offers the most comprehensive picture to date of the global history of communication research and education. This volume reaches into national and regional areas that have not received much attention in the scholarship until now, including Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East alongside Europe and North America. It also covers communication study outside of academic settings: in international organizations like UNESCO, and among commercial and civic groups. It moves beyond the trad...
Velvet Retro
Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. This innovative study locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory.
Audience Transformations
The concept of the audience is changing. In the twenty-first century there are novel configurations of user practices and technological capabilities that are altering the way we understand and trust media organizations and representations, how we participate in society, and how we construct our social relations. This book embeds these transformations in a societal, cultural, technological, ideological, economic and historical context, avoiding a naive privileging of technology as the main societal driving force, but also avoiding the media-centric reduction of society to the audiences that are situated within. Audience Transformations provides a platform for a nuanced and careful analysis of the main changes in European communicational practices, and their social, cultural and technological affordances.
