Marie Gillespie – författare

The accompanying Analysing Media Texts DVD-ROM is the winner of the 2006 British Universities Film and Video Council 'Learning on Screen Award' for Interactive Media (Course and Curriculum related content). More about the awards and the shortlist can be found at www.bufvc.ac.uk/conferences/learningonscreen/losawards.html

Visit the Understanding Media series microsite.

This book provides an engaging introduction to analysing media texts. Students learn how to do semiotic, genre and narrative analysis, content and discourse analysis, and engage with debates about the politics of representation. Each chapter provides readings and worked examples, from the classic 1959 film melodrama by Douglas Sirk, Imitation of Life, to contemporary television ads.

The book has an accompanying DVD-ROM for PC users.

“Another exemplary volume from the OU presents a wide range of questions that cab be asked about mediated texts and the complexity of providing adequate answers to such questions. An enjoyable interactive DVD-ROM offers exercises that allow the reader to make the critical language their own." Professor Annabelle Sreberny, Centre for Media and Film Studies, SOAS.

"This is an impressive resource, accessible and user-friendly, but authoritative in its development of established theories of textual analysis. The DVD-ROM offers a series of excellent exercises making this a 'must-have' for all undergraduate media studies courses." Professor Richard Paterson, British Film Institute.

"An excellent introduction to the theory and practice of media analysis [and] a much-needed ‘toolkit’... The DVD-ROM, with its 'cool' design, clips gallery and innovative narrative sequence builder, allows students to put into practice skills acquired throughout the text and offers an important tool for bringing concepts to life… A wonderful addition to a first-rate series." Alison Griffiths, Associate Professor, Communication Studies, Baruch College, The City University of New York.

For ''ethnic minorities'' in Britain, broadcast TV provides powerful representations of national and ''western'' culture. In Southall - which has the largest population of ''South Asians'' outside the Indian sub-continent - the VCR furnishes Hindi films, ''sacred soaps'' such as the Mahabharata, and family videos of rites of passage, as well as mainstream American films. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change examines how TV and video are being used to recreate cultural traditions within the ''South Asian'' diaspora, and how they are also catalysing cultural change in this local community.Marie Gillespie explores how young people negotiate between the parental and peer, local and global, national and international contexts and culturess which traverse their lives. Articulating their own preoccupations with television narratives, they both reaffirm and challenge parental traditions, formulating their own aspirations towards cultural change.Marie Gillespie''s in-depth study offers an invaluable survey of how cultures are shaped and changed through people''s recreative reception of the media.

For ''ethnic minorities'' in Britain, broadcast TV provides powerful representations of national and ''western'' culture. In Southall - which has the largest population of ''South Asians'' outside the Indian sub-continent - the VCR furnishes Hindi films, ''sacred soaps'' such as the Mahabharata, and family videos of rites of passage, as well as mainstream American films. Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change examines how TV and video are being used to recreate cultural traditions within the ''South Asian'' diaspora, and how they are also catalysing cultural change in this local community.Marie Gillespie explores how young people negotiate between the parental and peer, local and global, national and international contexts and culturess which traverse their lives. Articulating their own preoccupations with television narratives, they both reaffirm and challenge parental traditions, formulating their own aspirations towards cultural change.Marie Gillespie''s in-depth study offers an invaluable survey of how cultures are shaped and changed through people''s recreative reception of the media.

Diasporas and Diplomacy analyzes the exercise of British ‘soft power’ through the BBC’s foreign language services, and the diplomatic role played by their diasporic broadcasters. The book offers the first historical and comparative analysis of the ‘corporate cosmopolitanism’ that has characterized the work of the BBC’s international services since the inception of its Empire Service in 1932 – from radio to the Internet.

A series of empirically-grounded case studies, within a shared analytical framework, interrogate transformations in international broadcasting relating to:

The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology and anthropology, media and cultural studies, journalism, history, politics, international relations, as well as of research methods that cross the boundaries between the Social Sciences and Humanities. It will also appeal to broadcast journalists and practioners of strategic communication.

Diasporas and Diplomacy analyzes the exercise of British ‘soft power’ through the BBC’s foreign language services, and the diplomatic role played by their diasporic broadcasters. The book offers the first historical and comparative analysis of the ‘corporate cosmopolitanism’ that has characterized the work of the BBC’s international services since the inception of its Empire Service in 1932 – from radio to the Internet.

A series of empirically-grounded case studies, within a shared analytical framework, interrogate transformations in international broadcasting relating to:

The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology and anthropology, media and cultural studies, journalism, history, politics, international relations, as well as of research methods that cross the boundaries between the Social Sciences and Humanities. It will also appeal to broadcast journalists and practioners of strategic communication.

This volume offers unique insights into the mutually constitutive nature of social media practices and religious change. Part 1 examines how social media operate in conjunction with mass media in the construction of discourses of religion and spirituality. It includes: a longitudinal study of British news media coverage of Christianity, secularism and religious diversity (Knott et al.); an analysis of responses to two documentaries ''The Monastery'' and ''The Convent'' (Thomas); an evaluation of theories of the sacred in studies of religion and media within the ''strong program'' in cultural sociology in the US (Lynch); and a study of the consequences of mass and social media synergies for public perceptions of Islam in the Netherlands (Herbert). Part 2 examines the role of social media in the construction of contemporary martyrs and media celebrities (e.g., Michael Jackson) using mixed and mobile methods to analyse fan sites (Bennett & Campbell) and jihadi websites and YouTube (Nauta). Part 3 examines how certain bounded religious communities negotiate the challenges of social media: Judaism in Second Life (Abrams & Baker); Bah''ai regulation of web use among members (Campbell & Fulton); YouTube evangelists (Pihlaja); and public expressions of bereavement (Greenhill & Fletcher). The book provides theoretically informed empirical case studies and presents an intriguing, complex picture of the aesthetic and ethical, demographic and discursive aspects of new spaces of communication and their implications for religious institutions, beliefs and practices.