In the late 2000s, the Walt Disney Company expanded, rebranded, and recast itself around “woke,” empowered entertainment. This new era revitalized its princess franchise, seeking to elevate its female characters into heroes who save the day. Recasting the Disney Princess in an Era of New Media and Social Movements analyzes the way that the Walt Disney Company has co-opted contemporary social discourse, incorporating how audiences interpret their world through new media and activism into th...

Films as Rhetorical Texts: Cultivating Discussion about Race, Racism, and Race Relations presents critical essays focusing on select commercial films and what they can teach us about race, racism, and race relations in America. The films in this volume are critically assessed as rhetorical texts using various aspects and components of critical race theory, recognizing that race and racism are intricately ingrained in American society. Contributors argue that by viewing and evaluating cultu...

Developing Women Leaders in the Academy through Enhanced Communication Strategies explores the experiences, strategies, and triumphs of women who have attained leadership roles within the academy as well as the shortfalls, disappointments, and battle scars many women leaders have experienced in their quest to lead. Clear direction, focused strategies, and enhanced communication are necessary to increase the ever-growing number of women in leadership positions in the academy. Contributions ...

Narratives of Storytelling Across Cultures demonstrates how meaning found within interpersonal communication is not universal across all cultures. Miscommunication can occur when the foundations of cultural meaning within stories, as told socially and within media, vary among different cultures. Positioned within the communication and media field, this book connects issues of societal tension and political battles to media portrayals, social communication events, and power dynamic...

Along the Gulf Coast, history is often referenced as pre-Katrina or post-Katrina. However, the natural disaster that appalled the world in 2005 has been joined by another catastrophe, this one man-made—the greatest environmental and maritime accident of all time, the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. In less than five years, the Gulf Coast has experienced two colossal disasters, very different, yet very similar. And these two equally complex crises have resulted in a steep learning curve for al...

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, outsiders will have two versions of the Katrina experience. One version will be the images they recall from news coverage of the aftermath. The other will be the intimate portrayal of the determination of New Orleans residents to rebuild and recover their lives. HBO’s Treme offers outsiders an inside look into why New Orleanians refused to abandon a place that many questioned should not be rebuilt after the levees failed. This critically acclaimed series ...

The New York Times–bestselling roadmap to resistance in the Trump era from the internationally acclaimed activist and author of On Fire and The Battle for Paradise.The election of Donald Trump is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. Trump's vision—a radical deregulation of the US economy in the interest of corporations, an all-out war on "radical Islamic terrorism," and a sweeping aside of climate science to unleash a do...

This biography for young readers focuses on Michelle Obama's youth. A good supplementary source for home and classroom use, especially as the now former First Lady's book Becoming brings her renewed attention.Follow the story of a hardworking girl growing up on the South Side of Chicago and how she inspires our nation to believe in the American Dream that her life exemplifies. In her own stirring words: America should be a place where you can make it if you try.Written by D...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A passionate manifesto that exposes hypocrisy on both sides of the political divide and points a way out of the tribalism that is tearing America apart—from the CNN host hailed as “a star of the 2016 campaign” (The New York Times), now seen on The Van Jones ShowVan Jones burst into the American consciousness during the 2016 presidential campaign with an unscripted, truth-telling style and an already established...

The American people are frustrated with their government-dismayed by a series of high-profile failures (Iraq, Katrina, the financial meltdown) that seems to just keep getting longer. Yet our nation has a proud history of great achievements: victory in World War II, our national highway system, welfare reform, the moon landing.We need more successes like these to reclaim government's legacy of competence. In If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, William Eggers and John O'Leary explain ho...

It would be difficult to overstate the impact that Sam Walton had on business. The stand-alone box stores he pioneered changed America and the world. His innovations in supply-chain management and distribution reshaped the relationship between suppliers and retailers and took wholesalers out of the equation. He altered customers' expectations as well as the prices they paid for everything from socks to soda. Like few leaders before or since, Sam Walton changed the world. Here, in this shor...

Gaining a firm grasp on the famously fraught aftermath of Hurricane Katrina can seem as tenuous as its victims’ shaky grasp on survival. One man, Mayor C. Ray Nagin, was charged with being the unflappably calm eye of the storm. His long-awaited account, Katrina’s Secrets I: Storms after the Storm, weighs in on the chaotic days leading up to and following the biggest natural and man-made disaster in America’s history. Sincere and spellbinding, Nagin’s reckoning delivers exacting detail on t...