Representation (Key Ideas in Media & Cultural Studies) - Hardcover

"This book charts new and competing realities coming together to shape culture, society and people in powerful ways through media representation. To focus upon ‘representation’ is more important now than ever before. 'Produce' or 'be produced' goes the saying, and this book offers unique ways of evaluating the representational strategies at play."

Joanne Garde-Hansen, Associate Professor Culture, Media and Communication, University of Warwick

"Jenny Kidd's extraordinary intellect, wit and scholarship remind us that representation is always contested. Her lively discussion of ethical considerations wrought evermore complex by a continually evolving media landscape are noteworthy for their commitment to the human qualities which drive us to conceptualise both media and representation. Her discussions of ‘under’ and ‘mis’ representation offer genuine insights into the construction of meaning in a media-saturated global environment. A reader for generations to come."

Written especially for undergraduate students, Representation synthesises and updates our understandings of representation - and the tools for its analysis - for use in the new mediascape.

Jenny Kidd uses an engaging range of current examples and a lively style to explore a number of key questions reflecting existing and contemporary debates about representation.

These key questions include: Who ‘owns’ and manages representations? Whose realities are foregrounded, and whose are consigned to invisibility? To what extent are increased opportunities for self-representation altering the landscape? And what happens to representation within the noisy, playful and often subversive communications of the Internet?

Kidd considers the political, social and cultural importance of representation across a broad spectrum of cultural and creative industries.

This examination of the relationship between media/cultural representations and the construction of reality, identity and society makes it an ideal text for students that need to get to grips with this core thematic of media and cultural studies.