Forthcoming Books

When Media Are New: Understanding the Dynamics of New Media Adoption and Use

John Carey and Martin C. J. Elton

The technological, regulatory, and economic changes in new media have attracted the attention of a large number of researchers, from industry and academe, and given rise to a substantial body of research and data. Significantly less attention has been paid to the people who use new media—whose own rate of adoption and assimilation often lags notably behind the technologies themselves.

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Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?: Twenty Years of the Prison Creative Arts Project

Buzz Alexander

Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? describes the University of Michigan's Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), a pioneering program founded in 1990 that works with incarcerated youth and adults in Michigan juvenile facilities and prisons. Alexander recounts the genesis and evolution of this radically pragmatic and original system that begins with university courses for credit, then offers students a university-based nonprofit organization through which they may continue and deepen their practice, and finally gives them a national network as well as connections with the national movement resisting mass incarceration in this country, and with social careers in general.

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The Word on the Street: Linking the Academy and the Common Reader

Harvey Teres

The migration of critics and intellectuals from the public to the academy has resulted in fewer efforts to engage with ordinary citizens. The Word on the Street investigates this disjunction between the study of literature in the academy and the interests of the common reader and society at large, arguing the vital importance of publicly engaged scholarship in the humanities and for a return to an earlier model of the public intellectual and a literary and cultural criticism that resonates with the common reader and promotes an informed citizenry.

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Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics

Jennifer Gabrys

Where other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities, Jennifer Gabrys examines the multiple forms of waste that electronics create as evidence of the resources, labor, and imaginaries that are bundled into these machines. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Gabrys draws together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies.

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The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age

Amy E. Earhart and Andrew Jewell

The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age is the first of its kind: a gathering of people who are expert in American literary studies and in digital technologies, scholars uniquely able to draw from experience with building digital resources and to provide theoretical commentary on how the transformation to new technologies alters the way we think about and articulate scholarship in American literature.

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Home Truths? Video Production and Domestic Life

David Buckingham, Maria Pini, and Rebekah Willett

Over the past decade, the video camera has become a commonplace household technology. Home Truths? represents one of the few academic research studies exploring this everyday, popular use of video production technology as it examines broader issues about the nature of learning and creativity, subjectivity and representation, and the "domestication" of technology.

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