Culture and Power

Paddy Scannell worked for many years at the University of Westminster (London) where he and his colleagues established, in 1975, the first undergraduate degree program in Media Studies in the UK. He is a founding editor of Media, Culture and Society which began publication in 1979 and is now issued six times yearly. He is the author of A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1939 which he wrote with David Cardiff, editor of Broadcast Talk and author of Radio, Television and Modern Life. He is currently working on a trilogy. The first volume, Media and Communication, was published in June 2007. Professor Scannell is now working on the second volume, Television and the Meaning of 'Live.' The third volume, Love and Communication, is in preparation. His research interests include broadcasting history and historiography, the analysis of talk, the phenomenology of communication and culture and communication in Africa. Philip Schlesinger was appointed to the University of Glasgow's new Chair in Cultural Policy and became Academic Director of CCPR in January 2007. He was previously Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of Stirling and founding Director of Stirling Media Research Institute. He has been Professor of Sociology at the University of Greenwich, a Nuffield Social Science Research Fellow, a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute of Florence, and has held the Queen Victoria Eugenia Chair of Doctoral Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid. He was a longstanding Visiting Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Lugano, and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Toulouse, CELSA in Paris, LUISS University in Rome, the University of Salamanca, and a Visiting Scholar at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. He is the author of Putting 'Reality' Together (2nd ed. 1987) and Media, State and Nation (1991) and is co-author of Televising 'Terrorism' (1983), Women Viewing Violence (1992), Reporting Crime (1994) Open Scotland? (2001) and Mediated Access (2003). Colin Sparks is a professor at the Centre for Communication and Information Studies at the Univeristy of Westminster and Co-Editor of Media, Culture and Society. Anna Reading is a lecturer at Southbank University and Assistant Editor of Media, Culture and Society.

This broad-ranging book presents an introduction to the issues and debates which are currently central to media studies, drawn from major articles published in the journal Media, Culture & Society in the period 1985 - 1991.

IntroductionPART ONE: CULTURE AND POWERCulture and Power - N[ac]estor Garc[ac]ia Canclini The State of ResearchPopular Culture and Social Control in Late Capitalism - David TetzlaffPost-Marxism - Kuan-Hsing Chen Critical Postmodernism and Cultural StudiesFeminism and Cultural Studies - Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie StaceyMedia, Ethnicity and Identity - Thomas K FitzgeraldPART TWO: THE AUDIENCE AND EVERYDAY LIFEText, Readers and Contexts of Reading - Shaun MooresReading Reception - Kay Richardson and John Corner Mediation and Transparency in Viewers¿ Reception of a TV ProgrammeTeenage Girls Reading >What¿s the Meaning of This? Viewers¿ Plural Sense-Making of TV News - Peter DahlgrenThe Politics of Polysemy - Klaus Bruhn Jensen Television News, Everyday Consciousness and Political ActionWomen as Audience - Susan Kippax The Experience of Unwaged Women of the Performing ArtsPART THREE: THE MEDIA AND PUBLIC LIFEThe Alternative Public Realm - John D H Downing The Organization of the 1980s Anti-Nuclear Press in West Germany and BritainThe Popular Press and Political Democracy - Colin SparksFrom Production to Propaganda? - Philip SchlesingerPublic Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life - Paddy Scannell