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Dear all, With the usual apologies for cross-posting, I'd like to announce the publication of my new textbook Media and Everyday Life<https://he.palgrave.com/page/detail/media-and-everyday-life-tim-markham/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137477187> with Palgrave Macmillan. The book comes out of ten years' experience teaching the same first-year undergraduate media theory course, trying out different texts each time, and finding that students consistently fail to engage with certain themes, as well as being resistant to the analytical orientation to the media that dominates the literature in this field. This isn't because the students are incapable, but because they just don't share some of the core assumptions that pervade media studies. One of these is the Frankfurt School-inspired premise that the media sits at the centre of our society, acting as a kind of cultural machine that reproduces dominant ideas and ideologies as well as coercive relations of power. Jettisoning the Frankfurt School entirely would be counter-productive, but a properly critical discussion of cultural reproduction needs to take into account the idea that few people working in the media industries wake up with a burning desire to entrench social norms and hierarchies of power. Another assumption it challenges is that there's something profound, and potentially pathological, about new or digital media - indeed, even using the terms 'new' and 'digital' now feels anachronistic. There are other disjunctures too: the idea that electoral politics is or should be at the heart of society, that the public/private distinction is meaningful and worth defending, that there are certain kinds of events and phenomena that we should pay attention to, collectively. The book responds not by dismissing politics or power, privacy or news, but by setting out how they and other cultural forces are experienced at the level of everyday life - rather than in the canonical form through which they are conventionally presented. It bears emphasising that 'everyday life' does not indicate an uncritical descriptive account of what people do with media these days. The approach taken is phenomenological - not that I ever use the word explicitly. It means that each chapter takes a set of media practices, or forms, or institutions, and asks how they come to be experienced primarily as normal, even unremarkable, with scholarly explanations ranging from the political and economic to the cultural and arbitrary. It is thoroughly interdisciplinary in its approach, drawing on sociology, political science and philosophy as well as media theory - though it does so only insofar as such perspectives are useful, and straightforwardly explicable to students at the undergraduate level. The focus in each chapter on the experience of everyday life is not about me putting forward a narrow yet insightful academic perspective on media, nor is it a craven attempt to appear relevant to students. Instead, it's a heuristic device which allows us to identify what practices now count as normal across all aspects of our mediated lives, then to take a breath and ask how we got here and with what implications. It's also a way of showing that what students often regard as the drier aspects of studying media - its institutions and regulation, for instance - aren't external entities that need to be studied because that's what media students do, but lived aspects of contemporary societies: think of how deeply entwined practical realities like media law, market research and human resources regulations are with our internalised notions of gender. The aim is to establish a critical break with the way we usually experience media as given, to take a step back and ask challenging questions about what underpins that experience, and to set out the full range of academic perspectives available to begin to answer those questions. Hope you (and your students) enjoy it. Full details here: https://he.palgrave.com/page/detail/media-and-everyday-life-tim-markham/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137477187 Best, Tim -- Dr Tim Markham Reader in Journalism and Media Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies Birkbeck, University of London 43 Gordon Square<x-apple-data-detectors://0/0> London WC1H 0PD<x-apple-data-detectors://0/0> tel: (020) 3073 8380<tel:(020)%203073%208380> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> http://www.bbk.ac.uk/culture/our-staff/tim_markham http://birkbeck.academia.edu/TimMarkham Twitter: @TimMarkham -------------------------------------------------------- MeCCSA mailing list -------------------------------------------------------- To manage your subscription or unsubscribe from the MECCSA list, please visit: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=MECCSA&A=1 ------------------------------------------------------- MeCCSA is the subject association for the field of media, communication and cultural studies in UK Higher Education. 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