There is a timely and urgent need for a reasoned dialogue reassessing how Marxism can advance the study of human communication and transform the social world in which it is embedded. Indeed, ongoing world-historical events including the vigorously organized market globalization, the corresponding insurgent global anticorporate movement, and the conflicts engendered by the U.S. invasion of Iraq have underscored the importance of a thorough critique of global capitalism and its telecommunication technologies and practices. This important new collection, featuring essays by leading scholars and practitioners, provides a much-needed overview and assessment of Marxism's significance to contemporary thinking in communication and media studies. Contributors demonstrate how a Marxist perspective can be usefully applied to specific case studies in communication, providing valuable insights and understandings that are not obtainable using other approaches.

Autorentext

The Editors: Lee Artz teaches media studies at Purdue University Calumet in Indiana, where he is director of the Center for Instructional Excellence. A former steelworker and machinist, Artz has published books, book chapters, and journal articles on democratic media practices, social change, and hegemony in race, class, and culture. He is active in the antiwar movement, international solidarity campaigns, and the Green Party. Steve Macek teaches media and urban studies at North Central College in Naperville, IL. He is the author of Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right and the Moral Panic over the City (2006) and is active in the antiwar and media reform movements. Dana L. Cloud teaches communication studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Author of one book on the therapeutic rhetoric (1998), with another underway on dissident unionists, she has published articles on Marxism and poststructuralism, the labor movement, globalization, and race/gender in media. She is a member of the International Socialist Organization.

Inhalt

Contents: Peter McLaren: Preface - Lee Artz/Steve Macek/Dana L. Cloud: Introduction: Toward Conditions of Our Own Making - Lee Artz: On the Material and the Dialectic: Toward a Class Analysis of Communication - Dana L. Cloud: Change Happens: Materialist Dialectics and Communication Studies - Deepa Kumar: Media, Culture, and Society: The Relevance of Marx's Dialectical Method - Vincent Mosco: Revisiting the Political Economy of Communication - Colin Sparks: Contradictions in Capitalist Media Practices - Fabiana Woodfin: Lost in Translation: The Distortion of Egemonia - David W. Park: The Convictions of Reflexivity: Pierre Bourdieu and Marxist Theory in Communication - Lora Taub-Pervizpour: Toward a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the Sixteenth Century - Susan C. Leggett: Communication and Contradiction: Living History and the Sport Pages of the Daily Worker - Henry A. Giroux/Susan Searls Giroux: Corporate Culture versus Public Education and Democracy: A Call for Critical Pedagogy - Steve Macek: From the Weapon of Criticism to Criticism by Weapons: Critical Communication Scholarship, Marxism, and Political Activism.