New Books in Communications

Can I Say That: Your Go-To Guide for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is your safe space to learn more about diversity, equity and inclusion, and how you can be a force for change. Most DEI books focus on gender, race or the intersection of those two dimensions. This book adopts a broader intersectional lens while also providing concrete tools for allyship.This book is for you if: you want to know more about diversity, equity, and inclusion but don't know where to start; are worried about saying the wrong thing; feel uncomfortable talking about DEI; are worried conversations might escalate or end in conflict; or don't want to be the only one fighting for change.

By explaining the common fears we all face about DEI, you'll feel empowered to talk with confidence and take action.

Guest: Dr. Poornima Luthra is an author, keynote and Tedx speaker, business consultant, and leading practitioner-academic in the field of talent management and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). As a senior faculty at Imperial Business School and external faculty at Copenhagen Business School, she bridges cutting-edge scholarship with real-world impact. She draws on eighteen years of research, teaching experience, and expertise in the field of talent management and DEI in Asia and Europe. She is the author of Leading Through Bias; The Art of Active Allyship; and Diversifying Diversity, and contributor to Harvard Business Review. Can I Say That? was named as one of the 10 best new management books of 2025.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Doing The Work of Equity Leadership For Justice And Systems Change

How To Organize Inclusive Events and Conferences

What Might Be

Transforming HSIs for Equity and Justice

Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom

Black Women Ivory Tower

We Are Not Dreamers

Jumping Through Hoops

Speaking While Female

Leading From The Margins

Gay On God's Campus

Empathy Takes Action

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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The 21st Century in 100 Games (Routledge India, 2024) is an interactive public history of the contemporary world. It creates a ludological retelling of the 21st century through 100 games that were announced, launched and played from the turn of the century.

Aditya Deshbandhu is a Lecturer of Communications, Digital Media Sociology at the University of Exeter, UK. A researcher of video game studies, new media, and the digital divide, he examines how people engage with digital artefacts and seeks to understand how these interactions shape everyday lives. As someone who actively examines digital acts of leisure, his
research in the last decade has examined social media and streaming
platforms alongside video games and digital cultures. He is also the
author of Gaming Culture(s) in India: Digital Play in Everyday Life and also serves as an editor for this book series.

Khadeeja Amenda is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore, Singapore.
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In 1898, vaudeville actors Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown joyously embraced in a short silent film titled Something Good—Negro Kiss.
The first known film to portray African American affection, it was lost
for over a century until its rediscovery inspired contemporary
audiences with a powerful and enduring depiction of Black love. More
than a missing piece in an untold history of Black cinematic
performance, Something Good—and the magnetism of Suttle and
Brown—attests to the power of Black performance on stage and screen from
the nineteenth century to today.

In Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History (University of California Press, 2026), Allyson Nadia Field tells the story of Something Good
and recovers the forgotten yet fascinating lives of its performers and
their world. Drawing a vivid picture from sparse historical records, Acts of Love
examines popular culture's negotiation of blackness to reconsider the
intersections of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and cinema in ragtime America.
This book not only presents the story of Something Good, its
performers, and the drama of its rediscovery; it shows how the
rediscovery of this short early film changes our understanding of
American film history.
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How did a vast, nationwide institution like a modern postal system
come into being in Qing China—right at the very end of the empire?

In The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), Weipin Tsai
takes up this question by tracing the origins and early development of
China’s postal system. The book asks not only how such an institution
was built, but why it emerged when it did and in the particular form it
took. In doing so, Tsai situates the post office within the Qing’s
broader efforts to modernize, showing how its development intersected
with political maneuvering, imperial pressures, and changing ideas about
the nature of the state.

The Making of China’s Post Office examines both the
high-level decisions and the ground-level operations that shaped the
system’s creation and expansion. Tsai pays particular attention to the
economic and social pressures that drove its growth, as well as the
everyday work of postal employees, including the nitty-gritty of routes,
logistics, and administration. This dual focus allows Tsai to show how
the circulation of mail depended on the interplay between central
ambitions and local realities, while also uncovering the work that
happened at the local level.

Tsai’s book offers a new perspective on China’s encounters with
imperialism, efforts at centralization, and changing conceptions of
governance. In following the routes and emerging and routines of the
post, The Making of China’s Post Office delivers a rich account
of how a modern communications network took shape. This book will be of
interest to readers of modern Chinese history, as well as those working
on global histories of infrastructure, communication, and the state.
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Around 2016, buoyed by so-called data kranti  ("data revolution"), an aspirational neo-middle class of users in India accessed internet for the first time on their mobile phones. Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (MIT Press, 2026) tells the story of digital infrastructures that are being created by state-corporations for content and money to move and reach such users. It interrogates how their design impact the forms of inclusions and exclusions enacted as well as the horizon of social behaviors and expectations in "Digital India." The book contends that to
understand the possibilities and limits of India's aspirational
politics, media studies scholars should attend to infrastructures of
aspiration: the distributional logistics of streaming content and mobile money are the infrastructural backbone that recalibrate thresholds of
aspirational goals. 

Digital content media distribution is also shaped by how user
practices get entangled with particular affordances of platforms, and
hence the need to study both participatory cultures of circulation and
logistics
of distribution together. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic
fieldwork, critical discourse analysis and participant observation, the
book traces the supply chains of content delivery networks enabling
streaming video-on-demand services and informal ways of circulating "vernacular" music videos through memory cards. Unlimited does not restrict itself to formal media infrastructures, but also researches online phishing and lending scam assemblages to understand how such scams perform critical boundary work to reveal the cracks in and workings of financial distribution networks. This book offers a systematic examination of distribution considerations—including localization strategies—required for imagining mobile phone users across the varied regional geographies of "Digital India."

Rahul Mukherjee is Associate Professor of TV & New Media and graduate
chair in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at University of
Pennsylvania. His teaching and research focus on the logistical and environmental dimensions of digital infrastructures and platforms. Rahul is the author of the monograph Radiant Infrastructures, and his work has been published in Critical Inquiry, SM+S, New Media & Society, and Science, Technology & Human Values. He has co-edited a special issue on "Media Power in Digital Asia" for Media, Culture & Society journal.  

Priyam Sinha is an Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body, and her work has been published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. She is also a regular podcast host at the New Books Network and has been published in public writing forums like the Economic and Political Weekly, FemAsia, Asian Film Archive, among others. More information on her ongoing projects can be found on her website and you can follow her on X.
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