The word media hype is often used as rhetorical argument to dismiss waves of media attention as overblown, disproportional and exaggerated. But these explosive news waves, as well as - nowadays - the twitter storms, are object of scientific research, because they are an important phenomenon in the public area. Sometimes it is indeed 'much ado about nothing' but in many cases these media storms …
The diversification and politicisation of the mass media within itself and also societal pressure created by the mass media at a social level have caused changes to our social structure. The first change began with the contextual changes to the mass media, and this change led to visible changes in societies. That transformation has almost erased the distinction between the private and the publi…
Isaak Babel (1894–1940) is arguably one of the greatest modern short story writers of the early twentieth century. Yet his life and work are shrouded in the mystery of who Babel was—an Odessa Jew who wrote in Russian, who came from one of the most vibrant centers of east European Jewish culture and all his life loved Yiddish and the stories of Sholom Aleichem. This is the first book in Engl…
‘This book meets well the triple promise of the title – the inter-connections of place, people and heritage. John Mulvaney brings to this work a deep knowledge of the history, ethnography and archaeology of Tasmania. He presents a comprehensive account of the area’s history over the 200 years since French naval expeditions first charted its coastlines. The important records the French off…
In Awesome Families, Kathleen Jenkins draws on four years of ethnographic research to explain how and why so many individuals-primarily from middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds-were attracted to this religious group that was founded on principles of enforced community, explicit authoritative relationships, and therapeutic ideals. Weaving classical and contemporary social theory, she argue…
What can Roger Rabbit tell us about the Second Gulf War? What can a woman married to the Berlin Wall tell us about posthumanism and inter-subjectivity? What can DJ Shadow tell us about the end of history? What can our local bus route tell us about the fortification of the West? What can Reality TV tell us about the crisis of contemporary community? And what can unauthorized pictures of Osama Bi…
This book is an ethnographic study of the internal dynamics of a subcultural community that defines itself as a social movement. While the majority of scholarly studies on this movement focus on its official face, on its front stage, this book concerns itself with the ideological and practical paradoxes at work within the micro-social dynamics of the backstage, an area that has so far been negl…
At the time of the U.S.-Japan auto conferences in March 1983, the hoped-for economic recovery as manifested in auto sales had revealed itself quite modestly. Three months later, the indicators were more robust and certainly long overdue for those whose livelihood depends on the health of the industry--some of whom are university professors. With Japanese import restrictions in place until Ma…
"The Australian Federal Native Title Act 1993 marked a revolution in the recognition of the rights of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. The legislation established a means whereby Indigenous Australians could make application to the Federal Court for the recognition of their rights to traditional country. The fiction that Australia was terra nullius (or ‘void country’), which had prevailed …
Auguste Comte is widely acknowledged as the founder of the science of sociology and the 'Religion of Humanity'. In this fascinating study, the first major reassessment of Comte’s sociology for many years, Mike Gane draws on recent scholarship and presents a new reading of this remarkable figure. Comte’s contributions to the history and philosophy of science have decisively influenced positi…