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Chinese Television and Soft Power Communication in Australia discusses China’s soft power communication approach and investigates information handling between China and its targeted audiences in the eyes of key influencers – intermediate elites (public diplomacy policy elites in particular) in China and Australia. It explores CGTN (with staff from several professional cultures) and conducts a systemic test of how successful/unsuccessful China’s soft power message projection is in terms of congruence between projected and received frames as a pivotal factor of its power status. The analysis is based on a case study of frames in the messaging on Chinese international TV about China’s Belt and Road Initiative and in the minds of Australian public diplomacy policy elites. The question raised is whether and how Australia is listening.

This chapter examines the structural changes that can be identified in Ibero-American television in the first 15 years of the 21st century. Taking as a reference the main TV markets in the region (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Spain) and their peculiar historical developments, a brief introduction and overview describes their characteristics, potentials and limitations, underlining their strengths, weaknesses and challenges. The analysis, framed in the globalizing phase that cultural products and services are undergoing jointly with their increased digitization, suggests two fundamental drivers of change, summarized in the notions of concentration and convergence. To conclude, policies and recommendations for action are explored, with a view to promote and protect audiovisual diversity.

Age is not alone in shaping real and imagined differences in Internet use. Racial and gender-based stereotypes abound and need to be empirically challenged. This chapter explores the relationships between race, gender, sexuality, and digital cultures in one increasingly significant digital domain—gaming. With a review of previous scholarship on race, gender, and gaming, the author shows that we see few signs of a “post-racial” society being brought into being. In fact, gaming is a digital activity where racism and sexism are commonplace. The chapter thus leaves us with questions about why, when the Internet is a potentially powerful leveling tool in the quest for democracy and fairness, does it continue to be defined by egregious sexism and racism?

From its humble beginnings as a video game launched in the mid-90s, Pokémon has become a global entertainment franchise, even reaching into the world via "augmented reality" with the mobile game Pokémon GO. In the work, Nakazawa Shinichi argues that the Pokémon worldview is the best contemporary example of Claude Lévi-Strauss's "savage mind" (la pensée sauvage), suggesting that computer games can often be viewed as attempts to reconnect the human unconscious with the true, hidden essence of nature.

"African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness uses critical race theory to discuss American films that embrace contemporary issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender. Its linear history chronicles black-oriented narrative film from post-World War II through the presidential administration of Barack Obama. Editor Mark A. Reid has assembled a stellar list of contributors who approach their film analyses as an intersectional practice that combines queer theory, feminism/womanism, and class analytical strategies alongside conventional film history and theory. Taken together, the essays invigorate a "Black Lives Consciousness," which speaks to the value of black bodies that might be traumatized and those bodies that are coming into being-ness through intersectional theoretical analysis and everyday activism. The volume includes essays such as Gerald R. Butters's, "Blaxploitation Film," which charts the genre and its uses of violence, sex, and misogyny to provoke a realization of other philosophical and sociopolitical themes that concern intersectional praxis. Dan Flory's "African-American Film Noir" explains the intertextual-fictional and socio-ecological-dynamics of black action films. Melba J. Boyd's essay, "'Who's that Nigga on that Nag?': Django Unchained and the Return of the Blaxploitation Hero," argues that the film provides cultural and historical insight, "signifies" on blackface stereotypes, and chastises Hollywood cinema's misrepresentation of slavery. African American Cinema through Black Lives Consciousness embraces varied social experiences within a cinematic Black Lives Consciousness intersectionality. The interdisciplinary quality of the anthology makes it approachable to students and scholars of fields ranging from film to culture to African American studies alike."

While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like 'Mass Effect' or 'Dragon Age', Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. 'Video Games Have Always Been Queer' argues that the medium of video games itself can-and should-be read queerly. In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D.A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game 'Portal', or what Eve Sedgwick offers 'Pong', Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to 'pass' in 'Octodad' or explore the pleasure of failure in 'Burnout: Revenge', Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games-because video games have, in fact, always been queer.

"Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of community-based practices for cultural preservation, one that can offer indigenous perspectives and new technological applications for the imaginative reconstruction of the tribal past, the repatriation of the tribal memories, and a powerful vision for an indigenous future."

Fist-fights in television studios, dwindling media autonomy, sensationalism, fake news, religious hate, abusive trolls, political spin ... How did we get here? Three decades ago, before economic liberalization, came the expansion and privatization of Indian television. Technological innovation and easing of government controls offered the prospect of journalistic independence, artistic creativity and an empowered citizenry. This was rendered illusory by runaway growth and untrammelled commercialization. In that thwarted promise of the late 20th century lie the seeds of Indian democracy's current crisis. Telly-Guillotined: How Television Changed India tells the story of how technology was usurped, first by propagandists, then by the market. Going behind the scenes of the world′s greatest media explosion, this book describes the impact of consumerism on the newsroom, the shaping of a new cultural politics and the rise of a new politics of seduction. In a landscape of technological innovation, blurred boundaries and sensory overload, Amrita Shah paints a picture of the Fourth Estate′s challenging future.

Virtual History examines many of the most popular historical video games released over the last decade and explores their portrayal of history. The book looks at the motives and perspectives of game designers and marketers, as well as the societal expectations addressed, through contingency and determinism, economics, the environment, culture, ethnicity, gender, and violence. Approaching videogames as a compelling art form that can simultaneously inform and mislead, the book considers the historical accuracy of videogames, while also exploring how they depict the underlying processes of history and highlighting their strengths as tools for understanding history. The first survey of the historical content and approach of popular videogames designed with students in mind, it argues that games can depict history and engage players with it in a useful way, encouraging the reader to consider the games they play from a different perspective. Supported by examples and screenshots that contextualize the discussion, Virtual History is a useful resource for students of media and world history as well as those focusing on the portrayal of history through the medium of videogames.

The aftermath of Japan's 1945 military defeat left its public institutions in a state of deep crisis; virtually every major source of state legitimacy was seriously damaged or wholly remade by the postwar occupation. Between 1960 and 1990, however, these institutions renewed their strength, taking on legitimacy that erased virtually all traces of their postwar instability.How did this transformation come about? This is the question Ellis S. Krauss ponders in Broadcasting Politics in Japan; his answer focuses on the role played by the Japanese mass media and in particular by Japan's national broadcaster, NHK. Since the 1960s, television has been a fixture of the Japanese household, and NHK's TV news has until very recently been the dominant, and most trusted, source of political information for the Japanese citizen. NHK's news style is distinctive among the broadcasting systems of industrialized countries; it emphasizes facts over interpretation and gives unusual priority to coverage of the national bureaucracy. Krauss argues that this approach is not simply a reflection of Japanese culture, but a result of the organization and processes of NHK and their relationship with the state. These factors had profound consequences for the state's postwar re-legitimization, while the commercial networks' recent challenge to NHK has helped engender the wave of cynicism currently faced by the state. Krauss guides the reader through the complex interactions among politics, media organizations, and Japanese journalism to demonstrate how NHK television news became a shaper of Japan's political world, rather than simply a lens through which to view it.

This article considers larger methodological questions of what political work is undertaken when scholars engage in postcolonial critiques of video games within academic intellectual frameworks. What is postcolonial game studies, and what is its purpose, within the context of larger issues of inclusion, representation, diversity, and the challenging of hegemonic power structures? After surveying some of the key literature in postcolonial game studies, the author provides critical frameworks for understanding the means by which these approaches have largely been excluded from video game studies, and their crucial function in operating against the grain of profit and innovation-driven discourses in games. This work is the extension of a larger discussion of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance discourse within the liberal academy, and particularly the functions of postcolonial, postmodern and other critical cultural scholarly interventions. In this article, the author argues for a postcolonial approach to game studies, but one that refuses to be reduced to an institutional cultural labor of due diligence, or according to Slavoj Žižek’s term, a ‘culturalization of politics’. Through the work of Stuart Hall and Sara Ahmed on intellectual diversity work within the context of large systems and academic institutions, this article asserts that the perception that critical theorizations (like postcolonial game studies) exert pressure on efficiency and innovation is greatly outweighed by the rich toolkits they bring to video games as maturing cultural forms.

As a media form entwined in the U.S. military-industrial complex, video games continue to celebrate imperialist imagery and Western-centric narratives of the great white explorer (Breger, 2008; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Geyser & Tshalabala, 2011; Mukherjee, 2016). While much ink has been spilt on the detrimental effects of colonial imagery on those it objectifies and dehumanises, the question is why these games still get made, and what mechanisms are at work in the enjoyment of empire-themed play experiences. To explore this question, this article develops the concept of ‘casual empire’, suggesting that the wish to play games as a casual pastime expedites the incidental circulation of imperialist ideology. Three examples – Resident Evil V (2009), The Conquest: Colonization (2015) and Playing History: Slave Trade (2013) – are used to demonstrate the production and consumption of casual empire across multiple platforms, genres and player bases. Following a brief contextualisation of postcolonial (game) studies, this article addresses casual design, by which I understand game designers’ casual reproduction of inferential racism (Hall, 1995) for the sake of entertainment. I then look at casual play, and players’ attitudes to games as rational commodities continuing a history of commodity racism (McClintock, 1995). Finally, the article investigates the casual involvement of formalist game studies in the construction of imperial values. These three dimensions of the casual – design, play and academia – make up the three pillars of the casual empire that must be challenged to undermine video games’ neocolonialist praxis.

The Brazilian television industry is one of the most productive and commercially successful in the world. At the forefront of this industry is TV Globo and its production of standardized telenovelas, which millions of Brazilians and viewers from over 130 countries watch nightly. Eli Lee Carter examines the field of television production by focusing on the work of one of Brazil's greatest living directors, Luiz Fernando Carvalho. Through an emphasis on Carvalho's thirty-plus year career working for TV Globo, his unique mode of production, and his development of a singular aesthetic as a reaction to the dominant telenovela genre, Carter sheds new light on Brazilian television's history, its current state, and where it is going--as new legislation and technology push it increasingly toward a post-network era.

Stresses the crucial importance of LGBT festivals in promoting examples of queer cinema throughout Europe and the USA.

The first time I spoke in public about my work was during the Los Angeles Lesbian and Gay Festival in 1990. Cheryl Dunye was the only other woman of color on the panel. When I asked a question regarding funding, I naïvely stated that funding was not a prob lem for me considering the fact that my work at that time was of medium to low production quality. I had minimal access to a low-end production facility, and my piece was only five minutes long. I was alluding to the fact that it has been “easy” for me.

From #Gamergate to the daily experiences of marginalization among gamers, gaming is entangled with mainstream cultures of systematic exploitation and oppression. Whether visible in the persistent color line that shapes the production, dissemination, and legitimization of dominant stereotypes within the industry itself, or in the dehumanizing representations often found within game spaces, many video games perpetuate injustice and mirror the inequities and violence that permeate society as a whole. Drawing from the latest research and from popular games such as World of warcraft and Tomb raider, Woke gaming examines resistance to spaces of violence, discrimination, and microaggressions in gaming culture. The contributors of these essays identify strategies to detox gaming culture and orient players toward progressive ends, illustrating the power and potential of video games to become catalysts for social justice

Feminism in Play focuses on women as they are depicted in video games, as participants in games culture, and as contributors to the games industry. This volume showcases women's resistance to the norms of games culture, as well as women's play and creative practices both in and around the games industry. Contributors analyze the interconnections between games and the broader societal and structural issues impeding the successful inclusion of women in games and games culture. In offering this framework, this volume provides a platform to the silenced and marginalized, offering counter-narratives to the post-racial and post-gendered fantasies that so often obscure the violent context of production and consumption of games culture.

Deeply grounded in the legacy of Black lesbian artists, writers, and filmmakers, current Black lesbian filmmakers are helping to build infrastructure for a transformed future using deeply interconnected methods to transform the whole world and (while we’re at it) the meaning of life. This chapter looks at two projects, the established and evolving Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project based in San Francisco and the emerging Queer Renaissance and Black Feminist Film School Project based in Durham, North Carolina, as examples of the robust future of Black lesbian filmmaking as a transformative community-building practice. The Queer Women of Color

"Queerness in Play examines the many ways queerness of all kinds - from queer as 'LGBT' to other, less well-covered aspects of the queer spectrum - intersects with games and the social contexts of play. The current unprecedented visibility of queer creators and content comes at a high tide of resistance to the inclusion of those outside a long-imagined cisgender, heterosexual, white male norm. By critically engaging the ways games - as a culture, an industry, and a medium - help reproduce limiting binary formations of gender and sexuality, Queerness in Play contributes to the growing body of scholarship promoting more inclusive understandings of identity, sexuality, and games."--Provided by publisher.

The interactive book is a term heard frequently in reference to early experiments in multimedia production. But how to translate the concept of the book into a medium that has no paper, no pages, remains a challenge. Is not a book an object one holds in one’s hands—the cover affected over time by the acids and oils perspiring from the user’s skin, pages turned down and yellowed, torn or marked up? Research could show that the notion of the traditional book has been challenged throughout history. But this challenge has been accelerated with the growing accessibility of new computer