We Can Do Better - by Linda Steiner & Stine Eckert (Paperback)

About the Book

This book brings together evidence-based, feminist manifestos for media and communication. It offers real, actionable, practical solutions to media problems and deficiencies, and shows how feminist thinking can be usefully and effectively applied to a wide range of journalism, media, and communication practices. The book offers specific, feasible blueprints for restructuring media in ways that make them more equitable and more democratic.

Book Synopsis

Feminist Manifestos for Media and Communication brings together evidence-based manifestos for media and communication that take a feminist perspective and add up to a provocative vision of feminist media practices and of feminist communication. The book discusses critical problems and complaints in ways that identify and make the case for actionable, concrete solutions to media problems and deficiencies; it shows how feminist thinking can be usefully and effectively applied to a wide range of journalism, media, and communication practices. The manifestos are not "only" about women but rather offer specific, feasible blueprints for restructuring media in ways that make them fairer and more equitable along many vectors of identity, so that media can better serve democracy. These manifestos give concrete solutions to specific problems that can and should be implemented by journalists, media practitioners, students, faculty, and scholars. The manifestos are organized around three sets of demands: for better media practices, for more participatory online spaces, and for more precise and appropriate language.

Review Quotes

"Direct, accessible, engaging, powerful, and evidence-based. This treasure trove of feminist manifestos--on extraordinarily important issues--is a welcome gift to instructors of media and communication studies seeking to provoke students' attention and their activism as media consumers and future professionals."--H. Leslie Steeves "coauthor of Communication for Development: Theory and Practice for Empowerment and Social Justice"

"In We Can Do Better, two outstanding scholars bring together virtually every major feminist researcher across a broad swath of communication. These essays provide actionable solutions for fair and equitable media practices for women. I can't wait to share this book with both my undergrad and graduate students, not to mention every woman I know in communication. Let's all buy this book and get going."--Esther Thorson "coeditor of Digital Advertising: Theory and Research"

About the Author

LINDA STEINER is a professor and associate dean for faculty affairs in the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland; she previously directed the UMD's ADVANCE program, which promotes the interests of women and faculty of color. She is an ICA Fellow. She served eight years as editor of Journalism & Communication Monographs and has published nine coauthored or coedited books. Her coauthored books include Women and Journalism, and her coedited books include Newswork and Precarity; Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women's Suffrage; and Journalism, Gender, and Power.

STINE ECKERT is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University, where she is also co-PI of the NSF ADVANCE grant project to promote better gender equity policy in STEM fields. She serves on the board of WSU's Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies program. She chairs the Feminist Scholarship Division of the International Communication Association division's award for emerging feminist scholarship. She is editor of the bilingual journal Journalism Research / Journalistik. She is coeditor of Reflections on Feminist Communication and Media Scholarship: Theory, Method, Impact.