Two Faculty Members Edit Sixth Edition of Media Studies Book

Anthology reaches second spot on Amazon’s top 10 hot releases

The sixth edition of the award-winning anthology, Gender, Race, and Class in Media, edited by two Sacred Heart University faculty members, hit Amazon’s top 10 “hot releases” in the communication and journalism list after its release Aug. 27, reaching as high as the second spot.

SAGE Publications published the book, which was edited by Bill Yousman, associate professor of media arts and Lori Bindig Yousman, associate professor and department chair of communication studies.

Gender, Race, and Class in Media was the first anthology to adopt both a critical theory paradigm and a multicultural approach to media literacy. The book has been widely adopted in over 135 colleges and universities world-wide, making it one of the bestselling titles for SAGE not just in communication, but in any discipline. In 2017, Yousman and Bindig Yousman received SAGE’s Cornerstone Author award for the fifth edition of the anthology.

Compromising eight parts and 66 chapters, this book “provides students a comprehensive and critical introduction to media studies by encouraging them to analyze their own media experiences and interests. The book explores some of the most important forms of today’s popular culture—including the Internet, social media, television, films, music, and advertising—in three distinct but related areas of investigation: the political economy of production, textual analysis, and audience response. Multidisciplinary issues of power related to gender, race, and class are integrated into a wide range of articles examining the economic and cultural implications of mass media as institutions,” according to SAGE Publications’ official website.

Along with serving as the primary editors, Yousman and Bindig Yousman’s research appears in the new edition of the book. Yousman’s chapter focuses on media and the social construction of racial ideologies while Bindig Yousman’s scholarship examines representations of young women in teen television. Professor Amanda Moras from SHU’s sociology department also has a chapter on gender and race in rap and hip-hop.