Gender and the Media in the Broadcast Age: Women's Radio Programming at the BBC, CBC, and ABC - Justine Lloyd

The 20th century was a time of rapid expansion in media industries, as well as of accelerating demands for equality and recognition for women. While women's agency has typically been defined through the domestic sphere, the introduction of media into the home destabilised firm boundaries between public and private spheres.  Gender and Media in the Broadcast Age demonstrates how women as media producers and audiences in three countries with public service broadcasters (UK, Canada and Australia) have contributed to changes in our understandings of public and private. Justine Lloyd offers a new way of understanding how tremendous changes in social definitions of gender roles played out in media forms worldwide during this period through the notion of 'intimate geographies'. Women's participation in media continues to be a key challenge to notions of the public sphere and the book concludes that profound changes initiated in the broadcast era are unfinished in the age of digital media. Lloyd therefore provides rich and valuable evidence of the dynamic relationship between media texts, producers and audiences that is relevant to contemporary debates about a growing gender 'apartheid' in a mediated culture.

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Coming soon: a recording of the talks at the book launch.

Ideas in Time: The Longue Durée in Intellectual History - John Potts

Ideas In Time deals extensively with the history of ideas. The aims of the book are: to provide a coherent theoretical account of the ill-defined field known as ‘the history of ideas’; to emphasise the longue durée or long view in intellectual and cultural history; to develop a reconfigured history of ideas, attentive both to the endurance of certain ideas and beliefs, and to breaks and shifts in meaning over time; and to support this general ambition with studies of specific ideas over long durations, namely: the ideas of progress, democracy, zero, charisma, the Olympic games, and the idea of the West. Ideas in Time emphasises both historical continuity and discontinuity, drawing on both perspectives in its reconstruction of the history of ideas. This theoretical model entails the possibility of tracing the history of certain ideas from their ancient origins to their present expression, while acknowledging alterations in meaning determined by changing social and cultural contexts.