Legofied

LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media provides a multi-faceted exploration of LEGO fandom, addressing a blindspot in current accounts of LEGO and an emerging area of interest to media scholars: namely, the role of hobbyist enthusiasts and content producers in LEGO's emergence as a ubiquitous transmedia franchise. This book examines a range of LEGO hobbyism and their attendant forms of mediated self-expression and identity (their “technicities”): artists, aspiring Master Builders, collectors, and entrepreneurs who refashion LEGO bricks into new commodities (sets, tchotchkes, and minifigures). The practices and perspectives that constitute this diverse scene lie at the intersection of multiple transformations in contemporary culture, including the shifting relationships between culture industries and the audiences that form their most ardent consumer base, but also the emerging forms of entrepreneurialism, professionalization, and globalization that characterize the burgeoning DIY movement. What makes this a compelling project for media scholars is its mutli-dimensional articulation of how LEGO functions not just as a toy, cultural icon, or as transmedia franchise, but as a media platform. LEGOfied is centered around their shared experiences, qualitative observations, and semi-structured interviews at a number of LEGO hobbyist conventions. Working outwards from these conventions, each chapter engages additional modes of inquiry-media archaeology, aesthetics, posthumanist philosophy, feminist media studies, and science and technology studies-to explore the origins, permutations and implications of different aspects of the contemporary LEGO fandom scene.

LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media provides a multi-faceted exploration of LEGO fandom, addressing a blindspot in current accounts of LEGO and an emerging area of interest to media scholars: namely, the role of hobbyist enthusiasts and content producers in LEGO's emergence as a ubiquitous transmedia franchise. This book examines a range of LEGO hobbyism and their attendant forms of mediated self-expression and identity (their “technicities”): artists, aspiring Master Builders, collectors, and entrepreneurs who refashion LEGO bricks into new commodities (sets, tchotchkes, and minifigures). The practices and perspectives that constitute this diverse scene lie at the intersection of multiple transformations in contemporary culture, including the shifting relationships between culture industries and the audiences that form their most ardent consumer base, but also the emerging forms of entrepreneurialism, professionalization, and globalization that characterize the burgeoning DIY movement. What makes this a compelling project for media scholars is its mutli-dimensional articulation of how LEGO functions not just as a toy, cultural icon, or as transmedia franchise, but as a media platform. LEGOfied is centered around their shared experiences, qualitative observations, and semi-structured interviews at a number of LEGO hobbyist conventions. Working outwards from these conventions, each chapter engages additional modes of inquiry-media archaeology, aesthetics, posthumanist philosophy, feminist media studies, and science and technology studies-to explore the origins, permutations and implications of different aspects of the contemporary LEGO fandom scene.

Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry is an open access, peer-reviewed international journal. The principal aim of Capacious is to ‘make room’ for a wide diversity of approaches and emerging voices to engage with ongoing conversations in and around affect studies. Capacious endeavours to promote diverse bloom-spaces for affect’s study over the dulling hum of any specific orthodoxy. Introduction by Chris Ingraham and afterword byJette Kofoed & Jonas Fritsch. Essays by Alana Brekelmans, Maria-Gemma Brown, Carolien Hermans, Margalit Katz, and Matthew Tomkinson. Book reviews by Alana Brekelmans, Miles Feroli, Desiree Foerster, Edoardo Pelligra, and David Rousell. Interstices (short visual and textual interventions) by Paul Bowman, Max Haiven, Katja Hiltunen, and Lea Muldtofte. With a dialogue between Dominic Pettman and Carla Nappi.

Sports, Society, and Technology: Bodies, Practices, and Knowledge Production addresses the complex entanglements of science, technology, and sporting cultures. The collection explores themes around human and non-human actants, knowledge formations and processes, and the materiality and multiplicity of bodies through an engagement with the interdisciplinary fields of Sport Studies and Science and Technology Studies. Representing a range of methodological, theoretical, and disciplinary approaches, contributors interrogate the social, cultural, political, and historical intersections of an ever-expanding techno-scientific sporting landscape – from true bounce and brain trauma to exercise physiology, metrics, and esports, and from feminist technoscience, whey protein, and epigenetics to sickle cell screening and testosterone regulation.

Water, Rhetoric, and Social Justice: A Critical Confluenceexamines how individuals and communities have responded on a global scale to present day water crises as matters of social justice, through oratory, mass demonstration, deliberation, testimony, and other rhetorical appeals. This book applies critical communication methods and perspectives to interrogate the pressing yet mind-boggling dilemma currently faced in environmental studies and policy: that clean water, the very stuff of life, which flows freely from the tap in affluent areas, is also denied to huge populations, materially and fluidly exemplifying the currents of justice, liberty, and equity. Contributors highlight discourse and water justice movements in nonofficial spheres from activists, artists, and the grassroots. In extending the technical, economic, moral, and political conversations on water justice, this collection applies special focus on the novel rhetorical concepts and responses not necessarily unique to but especially enacted in water justice situations. Scholars of rhetoric, sociology, activism, communication, and environmental studies will find this book particularly useful.

In modern politics as well as in historical times, character attacks abound. Words and images, like symbolic and psychological weapons, have sullied or destroyed numerous reputations. People mobilize significant material and psychological resources to defend themselves against such attacks. How does character assassination "work," and when does it not? Why do many targets fall so easily when they are under character attack? How can one prevent attacks and defend against them? The Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management offers the first comprehensive examination of character assassination. Moving beyond studying corporate reputation management and how public figures enact and maintain their reputation, this lively volume offers a framework and cases to help understand, critically analyze, and effectively defend against such attacks. Written by an international and interdisciplinary team of experts, the book begins with a theoretical introduction and extensive description of the "five pillars" of character assassination: (1) the attacker, (2) the target, (3) the media, (4) the public, and (5) the context. The remaining chapters present engaging case studies suitable for class discussion. These include: Roman emperors; Reformation propaganda; the Founding Fathers; defamation in US politics; women politicians; autocratic regimes; European leaders; celebrities; nations; Internet campaigns. This handbook will prove invaluable to undergraduate and postgraduate students in communication, political science, history, sociology, and psychology departments. It will also help researchers become independent, critical, and informed thinkers capable of avoiding the pressure and manipulations of the media.

Reimagining Communication: Mediation explores information and media technologies across a variety of contemporary platforms, uses, content variations, audiences, and professional roles. A diverse body of contributions in this unique interdisciplinary resource offers perspectives on digital games, social media, photography, and more. The volume is organized to reflect a pedagogical approach of carefully laddered and sequenced topics, which supports experiential, project-based learning in addition to a course’s traditional writing requirements. As the field of Communication Studies has been continuously growing and reaching new horizons, this volume synthesizes the complex relationship of communication to media technologies and its forms in a uniquely accessible and engaging way. This is an essential introductory text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and scholars of communication, broadcast media, and interactive technologies, with an interdisciplinary focus and an emphasis on the integration of new technologies.

What if rhetoric and climate are intimately connected? Taking climates to be rhetorical and rhetoric to be climatic, A Reading Group offers a generative framework for making sense of rhetorical studies as they grapple with the challenges posed by antiracist, decolonial, affective, ecological, and more-than-human scholarship to a tradition with a long history of being centered around individual, usually privileged, human agents wielding language as their principal instrument. Understanding the atmospheric and ambient energies of rhetoric underscores the challenges and promises of trying to heal a harmed world from within it. A cowritten “multigraph,” which began in 2018 as a reading group, this book enacts an intimate, mutualistic spirit of shared critical inquiry and play—an exciting new way of doing, thinking, and feeling rhetorical studies by six prominent scholars in rhetoric from communication and English departments alike.