Jeremy Packer – författare

Packer focuses on cultural figures that have been singled out as particularly dangerous. Women drivers, hot-rodders, bikers, hitchhikers, truckers, those who “drive while black,” and road ragers have all been targets of fear. As Packer debunks claims about the dangers posed by each figure, he exposes biases against marginalized populations, anxieties about social change, and commercial and political desires to profit by fomenting fear. Certain populations have been labeled as dangerous or deviant, he argues, to legitimize monitoring and regulation and, ultimately, to curtail access to automotive mobility. Packer reveals how the boundary between personal freedom and social constraint is continually renegotiated in discussions about safe, proper driving.

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real.

Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences.

This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric.

The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real.

Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences.

This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric.

The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.