Description:
In Rethinking Global Security, Andrew Martin and Patrice Petro bring together ten path-breaking essays that explore the ways that our notions of fear, insecurity, and danger are fostered by intermediary sources such as television, radio, film, satellite imaging, and the Internet. The contributors, who represent a wide variety of disciplines, including communications, art history, media studies, women's studies, and literature, show how both fictional and fact-based threats to global security have helped to create and sustain a culture that is deeply distrustful-of images, stories, reports, and policy decisions. Topics range from the Patriot Act, to the censorship of media personalities such as Howard Stern, to the role that Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other television programming play as an interpretative frame for current events.
Review Quotes: The relationship between security policy and popular and public culture has changed dramatically over the last ten years, a change that calls out for probing critical attention. This timely collection pointedly responds to the need for genuine interdisciplinary engagement with such current issues. Its essays are excitingly original and sophisticated, providing analyses long overdue.--J. David Slocum "editor of Terrorism, Media, Liberation"