New Books in Communications Marshall Poe

How do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such documentary practices and settler colonial ways of seeing be refused?
Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art (Fordham University Press, 2023) by Dr. Danielle Taschereau Mamers investigates how the Canadian state has used documents, lists, and databases to generate, make visible—and invisible—Indigenous identity. With an archive of legislative documents, registration forms, identity cards, and reports, Dr. Taschereau Mamers traces the political and media history of Indian status in Canada, demonstrating how paperwork has been used by the state to materialise identity categories in the service of colonial governance. Her analysis of bureaucratic artefacts is led by the interventions of Indigenous artists, including Robert Houle, Nadia Myre, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Rebecca Belmore. Bringing together media theories of documentation and the strategies of these artists, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing develops a method for identifying how bureaucratic documents mediate power relations as well as how those relations may be disobeyed and re-imagined.
By integrating art-led inquiry with media theory and settler colonial studies approaches, Dr. Taschereau Mamers offers a political and media history of the documents that have reproduced Indian status. More importantly, she provides us with an innovative guide for using art as a method of theorising decolonial political relations. This is a crucial book for any reader interested in the intersection of state archives, settler colonial studies, and visual culture in the context of Canada’s complex and violent relationship with Indigenous peoples.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

In the summer of 2016, Disney introduced its first Latina princess, Elena of Avalor. Elena, Princess of the Periphery: Disney’s Flexible Latina Girl (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Leon-Boys explores this Disney property using multiple case studies to understand its approach to girlhood and Latinidad. Following the circuit of culture model, Dr. Leon-Boys teases out moments of complex negotiations by Disney, producers, and audiences as they navigate Elena’s circulation. Case studies highlight how a flexible Latinidad is deployed through corporate materials, social media pages, theme park experiences, and the television series to create a princess who is both marginal to Disney’s normative vision of princesshood and central to Disney’s claims of diversification.
This multi-layered analysis of Disney’s mediated Latina girlhood interrogates the complex relationship between the U.S.’s largest ethnic minority and a global conglomerate that stands in for the U.S. on the global stage.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to grieve beyond the human. Yet, Joshua Trey Barnett argues in this eloquent and urgent book, our capacity to grieve for more-than-human others is neither natural nor inevitable. Weaving together personal narratives, theoretical meditations, and insightful readings of cultural artifacts, he suggests that ecological grief is best understood as a rhetorical achievement. As a collection of worldmaking practices, rhetoric makes things matter, bestows value, directs attention, generates knowledge, and foments feelings. By dwelling on three rhetorical practices—naming, archiving, and making visible—Barnett shows how they prepare us to grieve past, present, and future ecological losses. Simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive, Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence (Michigan State UP, 2022) reveals rhetorical practices that set our ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to more connected, caring earthly coexistence.
Avery Weinman earned her Bachelor’s in History from UCSC and her Master’s in History from UCLA. Her work has been published in American Jewish History and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. She is a naturalist, an environmentalist, and a birder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

A hybrid lab functions in the space between institutions and infrastructure, creating new opportunities for understanding their interconnection. However, their legitimacy remains fuzzy without formal and methodological critique. The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (U of Minnesota Press, 2021) proposes the "extended lab model" to describe the relationship of various facets of a lab and uses a wide range of historical and contemporary case studies. This conversation covers the role of collection in academic labs, the influence of universities on labs and infrastructure negotiations, the acknowledgment of people and imaginaries in knowledge production, and transparency and accessibility. 
Find the Open Access version of the book here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

The Comic Book as Research Tool contributes to a growing body of work celebrating the visual methods and tools that aid knowledge transfer and welcome new audiences to social science research. Visual research methodological milestones highlight a trajectory towards the adoption of more creative and artistic media. As such, the book is dedicated to exploring the creative potential of the comic book medium, and how it can assist the production and communication of scientific knowledge. The cultural blueprint of the comic book is examined, and the unique structure and grammar of the form deconstructed and adapted for research support. Along with two illustrated research comics, Toxic Play and 10 Business Days, the book offers readers numerous comic-based illustration activities and creative visual exercises to support data generation, foster conversational knowledge exchanges, facilitate inference, analysis, and interpretation, while nurturing the necessary skills to illustrate and create research comics. The book engages a diverse audience and is an illuminating read for visual novices, experts, and all in-betweeners.
Dr. Stephen O’Sullivan is lecturer in marketing and consumer culture at University College Cork, Cork University Business School. His research is primarily situated in the consumer culture theory dimensions of marketplace cultures and consumer identity projects. Current research involves an investigation of contemporary play, particularly that which is harmful in nature. Stephen is an advocate for the greater application of creative media in social science. His published works can be found in the Marketing Theory, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, Consumption Markets & Culture, Advances in Consumer Research, and Journal of Customer Behavior. Contributes research films to the Indie Cork Film Festival.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital (Amsterdam UP, 2023) is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus Archive in Sheffield, UK serve as exemplary sites of historical mediation between early and silent cinema and the digital age.
A range of elements, from preservation protocols to technologies of display and from museum architectures to curatorial discourses in blogs, catalogs, and interviews, shape what the author innovatively theorizes as the archive’s hermeneutic dispositif. Archival Film Curatorship offers film and preservation scholars a unique take on the shifting definitions, histories, and uses of the medium of film by those tasked with preserving and presenting it to new digital-age audiences.
Archival Film Curatorship is available as an open access e-book at this link.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications