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Dating back to work done in Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research in the 1940s, media uses and gratifications (U&G)...

Zapping is the selective avoidance of television commercials, either by changing the channel with the remote control or by leaving...

The ways in which “the audience” has been conceptualized have moved, historically, through an arc from passive to active to...

Black feminist media studies is a growing body of scholarly work that looks at the intersection of media, race, and...

Commodity feminism refers to the way feminist ideas and icons are appropriated for commercial purposes, emptied of their political significance...

The question of what counts as “feminist popular culture” arises from an engagement with foundational debates within cultural studies as...

Metallurgy Careers Background The first crude metal objects, knives for hunting and tools for farming, evolved during the Stone Age....

Military Careers Background Five separate military services make up the United States Armed Forces: the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine...

Mining Careers Background The mining industry locates valuable minerals in the earth and water and removes them in the most...

Museum and Cultural Centers Careers Background Museums and cultural centers have many things in common. Their function is primarily to...

Music Careers Background Throughout human history, there have been numerous theories about how music originated. The great naturalist Charles Darwin...

Recording Industry Careers Background Acoustical recordings were the earliest efforts in recording live music with the intention of playback. Thomas...

Nuclear Power Careers Background In 1942 Enrico Fermi produced the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction with the first demonstration reactor,...

Packaging Careers Background Packaging is the planning, creating, manufacturing, wrapping, boxing, or bottling of goods for consumer, industrial, and military...

The history of federal land in the United States can be divided into five major eras, some of which overlap...

Petroleum Careers Background In the United States about 65 percent of the petroleum consumed is used for transportation, including truck,...

Foucault’s university education was a mixture of philosophy and psychology. He combined this with strong interests in aesthetics, social history,...

Sir James George Frazer was born in Glasgow, in 1854; he died in 1941 in Cambridge, where he spent most...

John Derek Freeman was born in Wellington, New Zealand. He first studied anthropology when Ernest Beaglehole offered a course on...

Structuralism is a powerful theoretical framework that dominated French thought in the 1960s. Deriving from the insights of the Swiss...

Sigmund Freud, born in Freiberg, Moravia, on May 6, 1856, and now known as one of the greatest minds of...

The highly influential writings of American anthropologist Morton H. Fried have made key contributions to explaining the origins of the...

The concept of friendship refers to a social phenomenon that is characterized by a diversity of ties and connections to...

Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, into an Orthodox Jewish family. A grandfather and two great grandfathers had been...

Functionalism was the predominant underlying theory in both British Social and U.S./American cultural anthropology from the beginning of the 20th...

Developed by James Lovelock in his 1979 work, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, the Gaia hypothesis offers...

The idea of a kindergarten originated in 1840, after the German educationalist Friedrich Froebel opened a Play and Activity Institute...

Intelligence is a concept whose meaning has been fashioned by the discipline of psychology. Psychologists view intelligence as a set...

Something like 25 percent of US university students currently major in business or management, and in the UK, 30 percent...

The study of educational practices in mathematics, science, and technology considers the social, psychological, economic, and political forces that affect...

The study of medical education as a process of professional socialization is at best a dormant and at worse a...

Central to the sociology of education are questions about how schools operate to produce learning. Sociological models of schooling recognize...

Scholarly interest in parental involvement was sparked in the late 1960s, when the seminal Coleman report (Coleman et al. 1966)...

Professors are people with academic appointments at institutions of higher education. Compared to just a half century ago, higher education...

Race and schools become a social issue when educational opportunities are differentially available to members of diverse racial groups within...

School choice refers to the use of public funds that give parents more discretion in their children’s education. It usually...

Television – which literally means “seeing from a distance” – has seldom been discussed by either critics or scholars primarily...

The term theatre refers to that art form based on mimetic activity. It differs from the closely related performance arts...

Typography is a process for reproducing text, figures, punctuation, characters, ornaments, and borders via a printing press or electronic communication....

Video began as a technological innovation and changed the media landscape of mainstream network television around the globe forever. As...

Visual culture is an area of study focused on practices of looking and the role of visual representations in the...

The study and conceptualization of visual representation were primarily associated with art and art history prior to the twentieth century,...

Voyeurism (from the French voir – to see) is a term used to describe the act of observing the actions...

Presence, in its broadest sense, is a media user’s state that is characterized by the illusion of nonmediation. If present,...

The study of selective exposure seeks to understand how and why people consume particular communication content when faced with a...

Perception refers to the process of categorizing and interpreting information that is attended to. Selective perception refers to the process...

Sensation seeking is a basic personality trait that has been defined as “the seeking of varied, novel, complex, and intense...

Few concepts in the social sciences have attracted more attention and caused more confusion than the concept of the “public.”...

Simulations are imitations of some “real-world” phenomena, especially the states of affairs of (real) natural or social systems or the...

Theories of human behavior differ in their conceptions of human nature and what they regard as the basic determinants and...