Mark Allen Peterson – författare

For members of Cairo's upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more "modern" places. In a series of thickly described and carefully contextualized case studies—of Arabic children's magazines, Pokémon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants—Mark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities. He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization. Peterson reveals how uneasy many cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.

This book provides a much-needed classroom text in international studies that is genuinely interdisciplinary in its approach. International Studies focuses specifically on five core disciplines; history, geography, anthropology, political science and economics, and describes them in relation to one another, as well as their individual and collective contributions to the study of global issues. The expert authors also emphasize the continuing importance of area studies within an interdisciplinary and global framework, applying its interdisciplinary framework to substantive issues in seven regions: Europe, East Asia and the Pacific, South and Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and North America. This new edition has been completely updated and substantially revised with two new chapters on Media, Sovereignty and Cybersecurity and Sustainable Development.This disciplinary and regional combination offers a useful and cohesive framework for teaching students a substantive and comprehensive approach to understanding global issues.

This book provides a much-needed classroom text in international studies that is genuinely interdisciplinary in its approach. International Studies focuses specifically on five core disciplines; history, geography, anthropology, political science and economics, and describes them in relation to one another, as well as their individual and collective contributions to the study of global issues. The expert authors also emphasize the continuing importance of area studies within an interdisciplinary and global framework, applying its interdisciplinary framework to substantive issues in seven regions: Europe, East Asia and the Pacific, South and Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and North America. This new edition has been completely updated and substantially revised with two new chapters on Media, Sovereignty and Cybersecurity and Sustainable Development.This disciplinary and regional combination offers a useful and cohesive framework for teaching students a substantive and comprehensive approach to understanding global issues.

This book examines how people around the world have articulated and shaped their experiences of COVID-19 through a sociolinguistic phenomenon known as magical thinking. Using case studies from throughout the world – China, Egypt, Europe, Jordan, Thailand, East Jerusalem, the UK, and the United States – this volume looks at how people managed ambiguity and uncertainty, risk, and social isolation by viewing their experiences of the pandemic as other than, or alongside, those presented by voices and images representing scientifically derived knowledge. Each chapter in the volume introduces the reader to a core semiotic concept and shows how it can be used to analyze and unpack a specific signifying practice. In the conclusion, the several concepts from the chapters – ideological positioning, entextualization and recontextualization, double-voicing, discursive grafting, imaging, and contagion – are revisited and synthesized in order to demonstrate that semiotics is useful not only in ethnographic studies of various “others” and of various “crises,” but also in explaining the quotidian experiences of everyday life. Ultimately, this book reveals that COVID-related magical thinking practices are often as “contagious” as the virus they reimagine, spreading through social media and resulting in such social phenomena as viral videos promoting and rejecting public health practices, the first-lockdown stockpiling of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, resistance to public health recommendations, anti-vax rhetoric, and competing interpretations of emerging public health data. This book not only represents cutting-edge research in the field, but it also provides students of anthropology, linguistics, media, and communication with the vocabulary and conceptual framework to understand the human experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book examines how people around the world have articulated and shaped their experiences of COVID-19 through a sociolinguistic phenomenon known as magical thinking. Using case studies from throughout the world – China, Egypt, Europe, Jordan, Thailand, East Jerusalem, the UK, and the United States – this volume looks at how people managed ambiguity and uncertainty, risk, and social isolation by viewing their experiences of the pandemic as other than, or alongside, those presented by voices and images representing scientifically derived knowledge. Each chapter in the volume introduces the reader to a core semiotic concept and shows how it can be used to analyze and unpack a specific signifying practice. In the conclusion, the several concepts from the chapters – ideological positioning, entextualization and recontextualization, double-voicing, discursive grafting, imaging, and contagion – are revisited and synthesized in order to demonstrate that semiotics is useful not only in ethnographic studies of various “others” and of various “crises,” but also in explaining the quotidian experiences of everyday life. Ultimately, this book reveals that COVID-related magical thinking practices are often as “contagious” as the virus they reimagine, spreading through social media and resulting in such social phenomena as viral videos promoting and rejecting public health practices, the first-lockdown stockpiling of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, resistance to public health recommendations, anti-vax rhetoric, and competing interpretations of emerging public health data. This book not only represents cutting-edge research in the field, but it also provides students of anthropology, linguistics, media, and communication with the vocabulary and conceptual framework to understand the human experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anthropological interest in mass communication and media has exploded in the last two decades, engaging and challenging the work on the media in mass communications, cultural studies, sociology and other disciplines. This is the first book to offer a systematic overview of the themes, topics and methodologies in the emerging dialogue between anthropologists studying mass communication and media analysts turning to ethnography and cultural analysis. Drawing on dozens of semiotic, ethnographic and cross-cultural studies of mass media, it offers new insights into the analysis of media texts, offers models for the ethnographic study of media production and consumption, and suggests approaches for understanding media in the modern world system. Placing the anthropological study of mass media into historical and interdisciplinary perspectives, this book examines how work in cultural studies, sociology, mass communication and other disciplines has helped shape the re-emerging interest in media by anthropologists.