Faculty Books

Archival intervention. In Heather MacNeil & Terry Eastwood (Eds.), Currents of archival thinking (2nd ed.) (Chapter 8)

Communication has often been understood as a realm of immaterial, insubstantial phenomena—images, messages, thoughts, languages, cultures, and ideologies—mediating our embodied experience of the concrete world. Communication Matters challenges this view, assembling leading scholars in the fields of Communication, Rhetoric, and English to focus on the materiality of communication.

Connecting Canadians: Investigations in Community Informatics represents the work of CRACIN, the largest national/international research effort to examine the field of community informatics, a cross-disciplinary approach to the mobilization of information and communications technologies (ICT) for community change.

Contemporary World Fiction: A Guide to Literature in Translation provides an overview of the tremendous range and scope of translated world fiction available in English. In so doing, it will help readers get a sense of the vast world beyond North America that is conveyed by fiction titles from dozens of countries and language traditions.

Currents of Archival Thinking explores key topics in the theory and practice of archival studies within the frameworks of the foundational concepts of the discipline, the main components of the archival mission, and the metaphors that shape how we think about archives and archival institutions.

This is an updated, second edition that explores key topics in the theory and practice of archival studies within the frameworks of the foundational concepts of the discipline, the main components of the archival mission, and the metaphors that shape how we think about archives and archival institutions.

Developing Animals explores how human perception has been altered and shaped by animal photography. Combining approaches in visual cultural studies and the history of photography, Brower argues that photography has been essential not only to the understanding of wildlife but also to the conceptual separation of humans and animals.

Media for diasporic communities have emerged in major cities, such as Vancouver and Los Angeles, and reflect a multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual reality. Both conventional media and increasingly prevalent digital spaces link migrants locally in their new homes and globally with their old homes. But do these media serve their respective communities exclusively, or are they available and accessible to members of greater society at large? Using case studies of Korean media in Vancouver and Los Angeles, Sherry Yu examines the potential of an intercultural media system for culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse societies.

Disconnect explores the challenges users face when they try to deactivate their Facebook accounts, and how efforts by social media companies to keep users logging in may be giving us less control over our digital lives.

Social media companies, not surprisingly, see user disconnection as an existential threat and take wide-ranging efforts to fight it, Karppi says. For example, there are messages with photos saying, “This person will miss you if you leave,” he says. “When it comes right down to it, “leaving is hard or practically impossible for some.

Karpi says people who do disconnect often find themselves returning to Facebook because the company makes it easy, letting them pick up their accounts right where they left off.

A combination of factors makes the platform irresistible, he says. That includes engaging content that captures users’ attention and the fact that they are surrounded by a network of friends and followers.