Culture and Power

`This is a much-needed and timely follow-up to an earlier reader by the well-respected communication journal Media Culture & Society. This recent reader consists of 15 publications taken from the period 1985-1991, subdivided into three main sections or parts: culture and power, the audience and everyday life, and the media and public life... This comprehensive reader of integrated critical media research will surely become an invaluable asset for all those scholars and students of media studies struggling to place power relations back at the centre of the debate about the nature and dynamics of the culture-society readership.' - Canadian Journal of Communication

`This reader of articles drawn from Media, Culture and Society presents a strong cross-section of studies which examine the importance of power for the study of culture. This book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the analysis of popular culture, the negotiation of the meaning of cultural texts, and the production of cultural forms' - The Canadian Journal of Sociology

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 Glasgows 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 lHomme 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.

Introduction PART ONE: CULTURE AND POWER Culture and Power - N[ac]estor Garc[ac]ia Canclini The State of Research Popular Culture and Social Control in Late Capitalism - David Tetzlaff Post-Marxism - Kuan-Hsing Chen Critical Postmodernism and Cultural Studies Feminism and Cultural Studies - Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey Media, Ethnicity and Identity - Thomas K Fitzgerald PART TWO: THE AUDIENCE AND EVERYDAY LIFE Text, Readers and Contexts of Reading - Shaun Moores Reading Reception - Kay Richardson and John Corner Mediation and Transparency in Viewers' Reception of a TV Programme Teenage Girls Reading Jackie - Elizabeth Frazer What's the Meaning of This? Viewers' Plural Sense-Making of TV News - Peter Dahlgren The Politics of Polysemy - Klaus Bruhn Jensen Television News, Everyday Consciousness and Political Action Women as Audience - Susan Kippax The Experience of Unwaged Women of the Performing Arts PART THREE: THE MEDIA AND PUBLIC LIFE The Alternative Public Realm - John D H Downing The Organization of the 1980s Anti-Nuclear Press in West Germany and Britain The Popular Press and Political Democracy - Colin Sparks From Production to Propaganda? - Philip Schlesinger Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life - Paddy Scannell