The Key Ideas in Media and Cultural Studies series covers the main concepts, issues, debates and controversies in contemporary media and cultural studies. Titles in the series constitute authoritative, original essays rather than literary surveys, but are also written explicitly to support undergraduate teaching. The series provides students and teachers with lively and original treatments of key topics in the field.
By Helen Wood
February 21, 2024
This accessible guide through audience studies’ histories outlines a contemporary Cultural Studies approach to audiences for the digital age. This book is not a survey of all existing audience research. Instead, its chapters survey parts of the field in order to draw some ‘through-lines’ from ...
By Peter Dahlgren, Annette Hill
September 30, 2022
Written with media students in mind, this accessible book provides both students and researchers with a new perspective on how to research engagement, not as a metric but as a marker of power relations. This book navigates the reader through a tighter analytical notion of engagement within an ...
By Micky Lee
July 23, 2021
This book provides a comprehensive, easy-to-understand introductory guide to information, offering students the critical tools they need to shift their positioning from consumers and users to creators and critics. Searching, accessing, and using information are central to most daily lives. Yet, ...
By Andreas Hepp
December 13, 2019
Andreas Hepp takes an integrative look at one of the biggest questions in media and communications research: how digital media is changing society. Often, such questions are discussed in isolation, losing sight of the overarching context in which they are situated. Hepp has developed a theory of ...
By Christian Fuchs
December 02, 2019
This introductory text is a critical theory toolkit on how to how to make use of Karl Marx’s ideas in media, communication, and cultural studies. Karl Marx’s ideas remain of crucial relevance, and in this short, student-friendly book, leading expert Christian Fuchs introduces Marx to the reader by...
By Christiaan De Beukelaer, Kim-Marie Spence
September 20, 2018
Global Cultural Economy critically interrogates the role cultural and creative industries play in societies. By locating these industries in their broader cultural and economic contexts, Christiaan De Beukelaer and Kim-Marie Spence combine their repertoires of empirical work across four continents ...
By Sean Redmond
July 19, 2018
Celebrity introduces the key terms and concepts, dilemmas and issues that are central to the study and critical understanding of celebrity. Drawing on two dynamic models from two different modes of enquiry – the circuit of celebrity culture and the circuit of celebrity affect – this book explores ...
By Julie Wilson
July 19, 2017
Thanks to the rise of neoliberalism over the past several decades, we live in an era of rampant anxiety, insecurity, and inequality. While neoliberalism has become somewhat of an academic buzzword in recent years, this book offers a rich and multilayered introduction to what is arguably the ...
By Jenny Kidd
November 04, 2015
Written especially for undergraduate students, Representation synthesises and updates our understandings of representation - and the tools for its analysis - for use in the new mediascape. Jenny Kidd uses an engaging range of current examples and a lively style to explore a number of key ...
By Ben Highmore
October 20, 2015
What are the qualities and properties that make something cultural? What does claiming something as cultural allow us to do? Culture offers students a workable understanding of the category ‘culture’ and explores how the realm of the ‘cultural’ can be practically explored as a way of understanding...
By Annette Hill
November 19, 2014
Reality TV is popular entertainment. And yet a common way to start a conversation about it is ‘I wouldn’t want anyone to know this but…’ Why do people love and love to hate reality TV? This book explores reality TV in all its forms - from competitive talent shows to reality soaps - examining a ...
By David Bell, Kate Oakley
August 27, 2014
David Bell and Kate Oakley survey the major debates emerging in cultural policy research, adopting an approach based on spatial scale to explore cultural policy in cities, nations and internationally. They contextualise these discussions with an exploration of what both ‘culture’ and ‘policy’ mean ...