Jeremy Packer

Joshua Reeves

In Killer Apps Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves provide a detailed account of the rise of automation in warfare, showing how media systems are central to building weapons systems with artificial intelligence in order to more efficiently select and eliminate military targets. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of political and media theorists, Packer and Reeves develop a new theory for understanding how the intersection of media and military strategy drives today's AI arms race. They address the use of media to search for enemies in their analyses of the history of automated radar systems, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the development of military climate science, which treats the changing earth as an enemy. As the authors demonstrate, contemporary military strategy demands perfect communication in an evolving battlespace that is increasingly inhospitable to human frailties, necessitating humans' replacement by advanced robotics, machine intelligence, and media systems.

War, Media, Machine

Killer Apps

Cameron McCarthy

Jack Z. Bratich

Applies Foucault's ideas to a cultural studies framework.

Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality

Applies Foucault's ideas to a cultural studies framework. Offering new and unique approaches bridging the gap between cultural analysis and governmentality studies in the United States, this book opens up new lines of inquiry into cultural practices and offers fresh perspectives on Foucault’s writings and their implications for cultural studies. It provides critical frameworks to analyze cultural practices and strategies of governing as ways of understanding the present. It also broadens the theater of intellectual debates over “culture and governing” studies from their current locales in Australia and Great Britain to the United States. Jack Z. Bratich is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. Jeremy Packer is Assistant Professor of Communications at Penn State at University Park. Cameron McCarthy is Research Professor of Communications and Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Uses of Culture: Education and the Limits of Ethnic Affiliation.

Why does the secret agent never seem to die? Why, in fact, has the secret agent not only survived the Cold War - which critics and pundits surmised would be the death of James Bond and of the genre more generally - but grown in popularity? Secret Agents attempts to answer these questions as it investigates the political and cultural ramifications of the continued popularity and increasing diversity of the secret agent across television, film, and popular culture. The volume opens with a foreword by Tony Bennett, and proceeds to investigate programs, figures, and films such as Alias, Austin Powers, Spy Kids, the «new» Bond Girl, Flint, Mission Impossible, Jason Bourne, and concludes with an afterword by Toby Miller. Chapters throughout question what it means for this popular icon to have far wider currency and meaning than merely that of James Bond as the white male savior of capital and democracy.

Popular Icons Beyond James Bond

Secret Agents

While Americans prize the ability to get behind the wheel and hit the open road, they have not always agreed on what constitutes safe, decorous driving or who is capable of it. Mobility without Mayhem is a lively cultural history of America’s fear of and fascination with driving, from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Jeremy Packer analyzes how driving has been understood by experts, imagined by citizens, regulated by traffic laws, governed through education and propaganda, and represented in films, television, magazines, and newspapers. Whether considering motorcycles as symbols of rebellion and angst, or the role of CB radio in regulating driving and in truckers’ evasions of those regulations, Packer shows that ideas about safe versus risky driving often have had less to do with real dangers than with drivers’ identities. Packer focuses on cultural figures that have been singled out as particularly dangerous. Women drivers, hot-rodders, bikers, hitchhikers, truckers, those who “drive while black,” and road ragers have all been targets of fear. As Packer debunks claims about the dangers posed by each figure, he exposes biases against marginalized populations, anxieties about social change, and commercial and political desires to profit by fomenting fear. Certain populations have been labeled as dangerous or deviant, he argues, to legitimize monitoring and regulation and, ultimately, to curtail access to automotive mobility. Packer reveals how the boundary between personal freedom and social constraint is continually renegotiated in discussions about safe, proper driving.

Safety, Cars, and Citizenship

Mobility without Mayhem

Stephen B. Crofts Wiley

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. Building on the work of materialist theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler, and Henri Lefebvre, the essays collected here examine the materiality of discourse itself and the constitutive force of communication in the production of the real. Communication Matters presents original work that rethinks communication as material and situates materialist approaches to communication within the broader "materiality turn" emerging in the humanities and social sciences. This collection will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in Media, Communication Studies, and Rhetoric. The book includes images of the digital media installations of Francesca Talenti, Professor, Department of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jeremy Packer

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