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The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture

About the Book Series

Dedicated to a renewed engagement with culture, this series fosters critical, contextual analyses and cross-disciplinary examinations of popular culture as a site of cultural politics. It welcomes theoretically grounded and critically engaged accounts of the politics of contemporary popular culture and the popular dimensions of cultural politics. Without being aligned to a specific theoretical or methodological approach, The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture publishes monographs and edited collections that promote dialogues on central subjects, such as representation, identity, power, consumption, citizenship, desire and difference. Offering approachable and insightful analyses that complicate race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability and nation across various sites of production and consumption, including film, television, music, advertising, sport, fashion, food, youth, subcultures and new media, The Cultural Politics of Media and Popular Culture welcomes work that explores the importance of text, context and subtext as these relate to the ways in which popular culture works alongside hegemony.

13 Series Titles


Representing Aboriginal Childhood The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia

Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia

1st Edition

By Joanne Faulkner
October 08, 2024

This book critically investigates the ways in which Aboriginal children and childhood figure in Australia’s cultural life to mediate Australians’ ambivalence about the colonial origins of the nation, as well as its possible post-colonial futures. Engaging with representations in literature, film, ...

Religious Satire in the Era of New Atheism Do You ‘Seriously Believe That’ After 9/11

Religious Satire in the Era of New Atheism: Do You ‘Seriously Believe That’ After 9/11

1st Edition

By Jerry C. Jaffe
July 18, 2024

Religious Satire in the Era of New Atheism presents a contemporary account of religious satire as evidenced by the modern art of stand-up comedy. Focused on the context of the post-9/11 American culture phenomenon, sometimes referred to as the New Atheism – as embodied by public intellectuals such ...

Isn't it Ironic? Irony in Contemporary Popular Culture

Isn't it Ironic?: Irony in Contemporary Popular Culture

1st Edition

Edited By Ian Kinane
January 09, 2023

This volume addresses the relationship between irony and popular culture and the role of the consumer in determining and disseminating meaning. Arguing that in a cultural climate largely characterised by fractious communications and perilous linguistic exchanges, the very role of irony in popular ...

Reborn of Crisis 9/11 and the Resurgent Superhero

Reborn of Crisis: 9/11 and the Resurgent Superhero

1st Edition

By Annika Hagley, Michael Harrison
April 29, 2022

This book examines the dominant popular culture convention of the superhero, situated within the most significant global event of the last 20 years. Exploring the explosion of the superhero genre post-9/11, it sheds fresh light on the manner in which American society has processed and continues to ...

Crazy Funny Popular Black Satire and The Method of Madness

Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and The Method of Madness

1st Edition

By Lisa A. Guerrero
June 30, 2021

This book examines the ways in which contemporary works of black satire make black racial madness legible in ways that allow us to see the connections between suffering from racism and suffering from mental illness. Showing how an understanding of racism as a root cause of mental and emotional ...

HBO’s Original Voices Race, Gender, Sexuality and Power

HBO’s Original Voices: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Power

1st Edition

Edited By Victoria McCollum, Giuliana Monteverde
October 17, 2019

This book constitutes the first major exploration of HBO's current programming, examined in the context of the transformation of American television and global society. With studies of well-known shows such as Game of Thrones, Girls, Insecure, Looking, Silicon Valley, The Comeback, The Leftovers, ...

A Perfect Union? Television and the Winning of Same-Sex Marriage

A Perfect Union?: Television and the Winning of Same-Sex Marriage

1st Edition

By Cory Albertson
June 07, 2019

On June 26, 2015, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy declared same-sex marriage "is so ordered" across the United States. The day will no doubt be remembered as a landmark shift in how U.S. society views and validates marriage and romantic relationships. But the shift would not have happened ...

Belligerent Broadcasting Synthetic argument in broadcast talk

Belligerent Broadcasting: Synthetic argument in broadcast talk

1st Edition

By Michael Higgins, Angela Smith
January 31, 2019

Why is rudeness such a prominent feature of contemporary broadcasting? If broadcasting is about the enactment of sociability, then how can we account for the fact that broadcasting has become a sphere of anger, humiliation, anger, dispute and upset? And to what extent does belligerence in ...

Cultural Politics in the Age of Austerity

Cultural Politics in the Age of Austerity

1st Edition

Edited By David Berry
October 18, 2018

In 2008 another economic crisis emerged in the long history of capitalism which created a period of ‘austerity economics’ across many nations. Cultural Politics in the Age of Austerity examines how austerity has impacted upon cultural politics in relation to understanding how established power...

Superheroes and American Self Image From War to Watergate

Superheroes and American Self Image: From War to Watergate

1st Edition

By Michael Goodrum
June 16, 2017

This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of comic-books, mobilising them as a means to understand better the political context in which they are produced. Structured around key political events in the US between 1938 and 1975, the author combines analyses of visual and textual ...

Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television

Masculinity in Contemporary Quality Television

1st Edition

By Michael Mario Albrecht
March 29, 2017

Recent years have seen a rise in the popularity and quantity of ’quality’ television programs, many of which featuring complicated versions of masculinity that are informed not only by the women’s movement of the sixties and seventies, but also by several decades of backlash and debate about the ...

The American Imperial Gothic Popular Culture, Empire, Violence

The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence

1st Edition

By Johan Höglund
September 06, 2016

The imagination of the early twenty-first century is catastrophic, with Hollywood blockbusters, novels, computer games, popular music, art and even political speeches all depicting a world consumed by vampires, zombies, meteors, aliens from outer space, disease, crazed terrorists and mad scientists...

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