Full Description
In today's thoroughly mediated societies people spend many hours in the role of audiences, while powerful organizations, including governments, corporations and schools, reach people via the media. Consequently, how people think about, and organizations treat, audiences has considerable significance.
This ground-breaking collection offers original, empirical studies of discourses about audiences by bringing together a genuinely international range of work. With essays on audiences in ancient Greece, early modern Germany, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Zimbabwe, contemporary Egypt, Bengali India, China, Taiwan, and immigrant diaspora in Belgium, each chapter examines the ways in which audiences are embedded in discourses of power, representation, and regulation in different yet overlapping ways according to specific socio-historical contexts.
Suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, this book is a valuable and original contribution to media and communication studies. It will be particularly useful to those studying audiences and international media.
Contents
1. Introduction: "Translating" Audiences, Provincializing the West Richard Butsch and Sonia Livingstone 2. Publics and Audiences in Ancient Greece David Kawalko Roselli 3. When Curiosity Met Printing: Audiences and New Media in Early Modern History Christian Oggolder 4. Shoppers, Dupes and other Types: The Television Audience in Post-Soviet Russian Discourses Sudha Rajagopalan 5. Between Unruliness and Sociality: Discourses on Diasporic Cinema Audiences for Turkish and Indian Films Kevin Smets, Iris Vandevelde, Philippe Meers, Roel Vande Winkel, and Sofie Van Bauwel 6. Producing Loyal Citizens and Entertaining Volatile Subjects: Imagining Audience Agency in Colonial Rhodesia and Post-colonial Zimbabwe Wendy Willems 7. A Consuming Public: Movie Audiences in the Bengali Cultural Imaginary Manishita Dass 8. "The Mass Wants This!" How Politics, Religion and Media Industries Shape Discourses about Audiences in the Arab World Joe F. Khalil 9. Egyptian Audiences of Musalsalat in the Eye of the Beholder Aliaa Dawoud 10. Senior Audiences and the Revolutionary Subject in the People's Republic of China Stephanie Hemelryk Donald 11. The Articulation of Audience in Chinese Communication Research Guiquan Xu 12. From Qunzhong to Guanzhong: The Evolving Conceptualization of Audience in Mainland China Jingsi Christina Wu 13. Active Citizenship: The Politics of Imagining Internet Audiences in Taiwan Fang-Chih Irene Yang and Ping Shaw
