Washington University Press Search Results Page

Rethinking the Spectacle

Guy Debord, Radical Democracy, and the Digital Age

By David Penner

Spectacle is usually considered a superficial form of politics, which tries to distract and deceive a passive audience. It is difficult to see how this type of politics could be reconciled with the democratic requirement...

Mediating Islam

Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia

By Janet Steele

Broadening an overly narrow definition of Islamic journalism, Janet Steele examines day-to-day reporting practices of Muslim professionals, from conservative scripturalists to pluralist cosmopolitans, at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia. At Sabili, established...

Political Elites in Canada

Power and Influence in Instantaneous Times

By Alex Marland, Thierry Giasson, Andrea Lawlor

Political Elites in Canada offers a timely look at Canadian political powerbrokers and how they are adapting to a fast‑paced digital media environment. Elite power structures are changing worldwide, with traditional influencers losing authority over...

Network Sovereignty

Building the Internet across Indian Country

By Marisa Elena Duarte

In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly determined that affordable Internet access is a human right, critical to citizen participation in democratic governments. Given the significance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to social and...

Diasporic Media beyond the Diaspora

Korean Media in Vancouver and Los Angeles

By Sherry S. Yu

Media for diasporic communities have emerged in major cities and reflect a multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual reality. But do these media serve their respective communities exclusively, or are they available and accessible to members of...

Reporting for China

How Chinese Correspondents Work with the World

By Pál Nyíri

While Western media are shrinking their foreign correspondent networks, Chinese media, for the first time in history, are rapidly expanding worldwide. The Chinese government is financing most of this growth, hoping to strengthen its influence...

Roy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Floor”

Contemplating the Art of Existence

By Ursula Lindqvist

Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson’s celebrated and enigmatic film Songs from the Second Floor, his first feature film in twenty-five years, won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. The “songs” of...

Breaking News?

Politics, Journalism, and Infotainment on Quebec Television

By Frederick Bastien. Translated by Käthe Roth

In the thousand-channel universe, politicians must find innovative ways to reach citizens on television. Viewership for news and current affairs television programs has dropped dramatically. Meanwhile, the rise of programming that blends information with entertainment...

Going Public

The Art of Participatory Practice

By Elizabeth Miller, Edward Little, and Steven High

Going Public responds to the urgent need to expand current thinking on what it means to co-create and to actively involve the public in research activities. Drawing on conversations with over thirty practitioners across multiple...

We Interrupt This Program

Indigenous Media Tactics in Canadian Culture

By Miranda J. Brady and John M. H. Kelly

We Interrupt This Program tells the story of how Indigenous people are using media tactics or interventions in art, film, television, and journalism to disrupt Canada’s national narratives and rewrite them from Indigenous perspectives. Accounts...

Icons of Danish Modernity

Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen

By Julie K. Allen

Julie Allen utilizes the lives and friendship of the Danish literary critic George Brandes (1842-1927) and the silent film star Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) to explore questions of culture and national identity in early twentieth-century Denmark....

The Audio Dictionary

By Glenn D. White and Gary J. Louie

The Audio Dictionary is a comprehensive resource, including historical, obsolete, and obscure as well as contemporary terms relating to diverse aspects of audio such as film and TV sound, recording, Hi-Fi, and acoustics.

The Third Edition...

The Power of Song

Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution

By Guntis Smidchens

The Power of Song shows how the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania confronted a military superpower and achieved independence in the Baltic “Singing Revolution.” When attacked by Soviet soldiers in public displays of violent...

Verse Going Viral

China's New Media Scenes

By Heather Inwood

Verse Going Viral examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Heather Inwood sets out to unravel...

Family Revolution

Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture

By Hui Faye Xiao

As state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolution—an overhaul of family structure, marital practices, and gender relationships. While the nuclear family has become a...

Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire

Colonial Relations, Humanitarian Discourses, and the Imperial Press

By Kenton Storey

During the 1850s and 1860s, there was considerable anxiety among British settlers over the potential for Indigenous rebellion and violence. Yet, publicly admitting to this fear would have gone counter to Victorian notions of racial...

Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration)

By C. Claire Thomson

Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg's searing film Festen (“The Celebration”) was the first film from the Dogme 95 stable. Adhering to Dogme's cinematic purity — no artificial lighting, no superficial action, no credit for the director,...

Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love

By Anna Westerstahl Stenport

Lukas Moodysson is one of the most accomplished and unconventional filmmakers of his generation in Sweden. Moodysson, now well known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in...

Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia

Fiction, Film and Social Change

By Andrew Nestingen

Scandinavian popular novels and films have flourished in the last thirty years. In Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia, Andrew Nestingen argues that the growth and visibility of popular culture have been at the heart of...

Return to the Land of the Head Hunters

Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema

By Brad Evans, Aaron Glass, Bill Holm

The first silent feature film with an "all Indian" cast and a surviving original orchestral score, Edward Curtis's 1914 In the Land of the Head Hunters was a landmark of early cinema. Influential but often...