AN INCREDIBLE SPIRITUAL ADVENTURE A dying man's final brushstrokes create an image that shatters another man's life, sending him on a pilgrimage of self-discovery. He must cross the barriers of time, space, death, and even individuality. The prize? Joy beyond all darkness: a spiritual radiance of inner bliss and completeness, an all-consuming love: the ultimate human experience. How many of us are called to undertake this pilgrimage? How many are strong and fearless enough to complete it? ...

Written for a broad audience and grounded in cutting-edge, contemporary scholarship, this volume addresses some of the key questions asked about pornography today. What is it? For whom is it produced? What sorts of sexualities does it help produce? Why should we study it, and what should be the most urgent issues when we do? What does it mean when we talk about pornography as violence? What could it mean if we discussed pornography through frameworks of consent, self-determination and perf...

This book presents an innovative cross-disciplinary report on research across the humanities and social sciences about the relationship between pornography and its consumers.For policy makers and the wider public it can be difficult to obtain a clear understanding of the current state of knowledge on pornography and its relationships with audiences, due to the often-contradictory nature of research spanning the various and politically diverse academic disciplines. The cross-discipl...

True or false: Most porn users are uneducated, lonely and sad old men All porn is violent Pornography turns people into rapists and/or paedophiles Pornography uniformly portrays women as passive objects of men's sexual urges The Porn Report debunks these and many other misconceptions about porn consumers, producers and the industry at large. In the first comprehensive examination of the production and consumption of pornography in Australia, Alan McKee, Kath Albury and Catharine L...

`Alan McKee presents a student friendly introduction to the analysis of cultural texts. The book highlights the cultural differences in interpretation with an array of fascinating examples. Textual Analysis is written in an accessible style with several useful case studies. Each chapter also includes exercises for classroom′ - Jane Stokes, London Metropolitan University`McKee is a gifted practitioner of the skills he would teach in this book, as well as a lively an...

This is a concise and accessible introduction into the concept of objectification, one of the most frequently recurring terms in both academic and media debates on the gendered politics of contemporary culture, and core to critiquing the social positions of sex and sexism.Objectification is an issue of media representation and everyday experiences alike. Central to theories of film spectatorship, beauty fashion and sex, objectification is connected to the harassment and discriminat...

Combining media effects with aesthetic approaches this book offers the first substantial, systematic and coherent account of fun and its importance. But what exactly is fun and what purposes does it serve? Fun is a vital element of entertainment, and entertainment is the most important form of culture in modern Western democracies. It demonstrates that fun is at the heart of entertainment's effects – entertainment both offers its consumers fun and provides them with the intellectual materi...

Entertainment Industries is the first book to map entertainment as a cultural system. Including work from world-renowned analysts such as Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, this innovative collection explains what entertainment is and how it works.Entertainment is audience-centred culture. The Entertainment Industries are a uniquely interdisciplinary collection of evolving businesses that openly monitor evolving cultural trends and work within them. The producers of entertai...

Children and young people in the early twenty-first century encounter, and creatively adapt to, a range of cultural phenomena in an increasingly mediated, commercialised and globalised world. Children and young people's cultural worlds offers a critical introduction to childhood in the digital age. Childhood innocence is a concept that often underpins the way adults think about children and new technologies. The book challenges adult concerns, highlighting instead the diversity of children...

Introducing media criticism as well as teaching about the media, in inter-disciplinary and 'across the curriculum' teaching, this is the first critical reference book on the important curriculum initiatives taking place in media education. The core of the book is a collection of essays on key concepts from media studies, including 'language', 'narrative', 'institution', 'audience', 'representation', and 'the production process'. Written by teachers for teachers, these essays organise ideas...

This book analyses new and hybrid genres of television including observational documentaries, talk shows, game shows, docu-soaps, dramatic reconstructions, law and order programming and 24/7 formats such as Big Brother and Survivor.

How do you picture identity? What happens when you ask individuals to make visual representations of their own identities, influences, and relationships?Drawing upon an array of disciplines from neuroscience to philosophy, and art to social theory, David Gauntlett explores the ways in which researchers can embrace people's everyday creativity in order to understand social experience.Seeking an alternative to traditional interviews and focus groups, he outlines studies in wh...