New Book: Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere

Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere
Veronika Koller & Ruth Wodak, Lancaster University, UK.

This volume addresses the acute dilemma of the public sphere, which is by definition open
to everyone but in practice often excludes particular groups of people in particular
societies at particular points in time. Thus, the theoretical and conceptual issues of
participation and democratisation are at the core of this volume. The guiding questions
for this collection of articles are therefore: Who has access to the public sphere? How
is this access enabled or disabled? Under what conditions is it granted or withheld, and
by whom? Due to the salient changes of the notions of time and space, communication and
language(s) nowadays cover many more domains and use different channels: Communication
has become ubiquitous, fast and global. These changes have enormous impact on both
institutional, public and every day lives. We regard the public sphere as the nodal point
for the discourses of business, politics and media, and this basic assumption is also s
reflected in the structure of the volume. Each of these three macro-topics comprises
chapters by international renowned scholars from a variety of disciplines and research
traditions who each combine up-to-date overviews of the relevant literature with their
own cutting-edge research into aspects of different public spheres such as corporate
promotional communication, political rhetoric or genre features of electronic mass media.
The broad scope of the volume is also reflected in a comprehensive discussion of
communication technologies ranging from conventional spoken and written genres such as
company brochures, political speeches and TV shows to emerging ones like customer chat
forums, political blogs and text messaging. Due to the books' wide scope, its
interdisciplinary approach and its clear structure, it addresses researchers, scholars
and post-graduate students in communication and media.

Publisher: de Gruyter Mouton (July 2010)
ISBN-10: 3110226057
ISBN-13: 978-3110226058