The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice

With contributions from 35 leading media scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive overview of the main methodologies of critical media studies.

Fully revised and updated throughout, the chapters in this second edition address various methods of textual analysis, as well as reception studies, policy studies, production studies, and contextual, multi-method approaches, like intertextuality and cultural geography. Film and television are at the heart of the collection, which also addresses digital technologies and new research tools in such areas as software studies, gaming, and social media. Each chapter includes an intellectual history of a particular method or approach, a discussion of why and how it was used to study a particular medium or media, relevant examples of influential work in the area, and an in-depth review of a case study drawn from the author’s own research.

Together, the chapters in this collection give media scholars and critics a complete toolbox of essential critical media studies methodologies.

Michael Kackman is Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture (2005) and co-editor of Flow TV: Television in the Age of Media Convergence (2010). His research centers on the history and historiography of American television, with particular attention to the shifting relationships between television and U.S. nationhood.

Mary Celeste Kearney is Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. She is author of Girls Make Media and Gender and Rock and the editor of The Gender and Media Reader as well as two volumes of Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture. She edits the book series Routledge Research in Gender, Sexuality, and Media. Her current book project focuses on the first wave of U.S. teen-girl entertainment.