In this interview conducted shortly before his death in 2014, Stuart Hall, one of the seminal figures in cultural studies, talks about his classic work Policing the Crisis, describes the political, symbolic, and material concerns that animated cultural studies in the 1970s, and offers a critical assessment of the field today. He then turns his attention to the always shifting terrain of race and identity in the United States and Britain, offering fascinating cultural and political insights into the presidency of Barack Obama and the 2012 Olympics in London. While Hall was physically ill for much of his later life, this final interview provides powerful testimony that his formidable intellect, sense of humor, and willingness to engage with the gritty realities of politics and power never deserted him. An absolutely essential resource for anyone interested in cultural studies.

In this new, highly anticipated update of her pioneering Killing Us Softly series, the first in more than a decade, Jean Kilbourne takes a fresh look at how advertising traffics in distorted and destructive ideals of femininity. The film marshals a range of new print and television advertisements to lay bare a stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes - images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality. By bringing Kilbourne's groundbreaking analysis up to date, Killing Us Softly 4 stands to challenge a new generation of students to take advertising seriously, and to think critically about popular culture and its relationship to sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence.

In this highly anticipated update of the influential and widely acclaimed Tough Guise, pioneering anti-violence educator and cultural theorist Jackson Katz argues that the ongoing epidemic of men's violence in America is rooted in our inability as a society to move beyond outmoded ideals of manhood. In a sweeping analysis that cuts across racial, ethnic, and class lines, Katz examines mass shootings, day-to-day gun violence, violence against women, bullying, gay-bashing, and American militarism against the backdrop of a culture that has normalized violent and regressive forms of masculinity in the face of challenges to traditional male power and authority. Along the way, the film provides a stunning look at the violent, sexist, and homophobic messages boys and young men routinely receive from virtually every corner of the culture, from television, movies, video games, and advertising to pornography, the sports culture, and US political culture. Tough Guise 2 stands to empower a new generation of young men - and women - to challenge the myth that being a real man means putting up a false front and engaging in violent and self-destructive behavior.

Communication scholar Sut Jhally applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman's groundbreaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape in this provocative new film about gender as a ritualized cultural performance. Uncovering a remarkable pattern of gender-specific poses, Jhally explores Goffman's central claim that the way the body is displayed in advertising communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity. The film looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of surface objectification and beauty, taking us into the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations. With its sustained focus on the fundamental importance of gender, power, and how our perceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman get reproduced and reinforced on the level of culture in our everyday lives, The Codes of Gender is certain to inspire discussion and debate across a range of disciplines.

Dreamworlds 3, the highly anticipated update of Dreamworlds 2 (1995), examines the stories contemporary music videos tell about girls and women, and by extension boys and men, providing a meticulous analysis of how these narratives reflect and shape individual and cultural attitudes toward femininity, masculinity, sexuality, and race. Systematically dismantling music video's most persistent and disturbing stock representations, and setting them against cases of real-world violence, sexism and discrimination, the film inspires viewers to critically examine how the distorted images of the "Dreamworld" connect with the lives of real girls and women, and real boys and men.

Pornography has moved from the margins of society into the very mainstream of American culture. From Internet pornography to MTV, sexualized images of idealized women and men jump off the screen and into our lives, in the process shaping our gender identities, our body image, and our most intimate relationships. In this multimedia presentation based on her acclaimed book, leading anti-porn feminist and scholar Gail Dines argues that the dominant images and stories disseminated by the multibillion-dollar pornography industry produce and reproduce a gender system that undermines equality and encourages violence against women. In direct opposition to claims that porn has delivered a more liberated, edgy sexuality, Dines reveals a mass-produced vision of sex that is at once profoundly sexist and deeply destructive-a vision that limits our ability to create authentic, equal relationships free of violence and degradation. The result is a fascinating introduction to the core arguments of the feminist anti-pornography movement.

Consumer capitalism dominates our economy, our politics, and our culture, even though a growing body of research suggests it may be well past its sell-by date. In Consumerism and the Limits to Imagination, media scholar Justin Lewis makes a compelling case that consumer capitalism can no longer deliver on its promise of enhancing quality of life, and argues that changing direction will require changing our media system and our cultural environment. After showing how consumer capitalism has become economically and environmentally unsustainable, Lewis explores how our cultural and information industries make it difficult to envision other forms of human progress by limiting critical thinking and keeping us locked in a cycle of consumption. And he argues that change will only be possible if we take culture seriously and transform the very way we organize our media and communications systems.

In this powerful new film based on his bestselling book, sociologist Michael Kimmel maps the troubling social world where boys become men -- a new stage of development he calls "Guyland." Arguing that the traditional adult signposts and cultural signals that once helped boys navigate their way to manhood are no longer clear, Kimmel provides an astonishing glimpse into a world where more and more young men are trying desperately to prove their masculinity to other young men -- with frequently disastrous consequences for young women and other young men. GUYLAND offers a way for all of us -- parents, young men and women, community members, and professors and administrators -- to envision new ways to support young men as they navigate this often perilous world.

For years, there has been widespread speculation, but very little consensus, about the relationship between violent video games and violence in the real world. Joystick Warriors provides the clearest account yet of the latest research on this issue. Drawing on the insights of media scholars, military analysts, combat veterans, and gamers themselves, the film trains its sights on the wildly popular genre of first-person shooter games, exploring how the immersive experience they offer links up with the larger stories we tell ourselves as a culture about violence, militarism, guns, and manhood. Along the way, it examines the game industrýs longstanding working relationship with the US military and the American gun industry, and offers a riveting examination of the games themselves ́ showing how they work to sanitize, glamorize, and normalize violence while cultivating dangerously regressive attitudes and ideas about masculinity and militarism.

In this classic 1989 lecture, now available for the first time, world-renowned cultural theorist Stuart Hall traces the social, intellectual, and institutional environment from which cultural studies emerged. An invaluable introduction to the issues that inspired cultural studies as both an intellectual and political project.

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky overturn one of the dominant myths in our political culture - the notion that mainstream media have a liberal bias. Drawing on extensive empirical research, they reveal that in actuality the news media have become so subordinated to corporate interests that they are far to the right of the American people.

Political theorist Justin Lewis examines how polling data presented in the media do not simply reflect what Americans think, but construct public opinion itself. Exploding the myth that most Americans are moderate or conservative, Constructing Public Opinion demonstrates how political elites help to promote militarism, and how mainstream media sustain an electoral system with a built-in bias against the interests of ordinary people.