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Rural Media Studies: A Global Perspective
Deep Insights

Rashid Gabdulhakov, Marc Esteve del Valle (eds.)

Bloomsbury Academic (2026), 288 pp.

"Rural Media Studies: A Global Perspective brings together scholars from across the world to examine how digital technologies, platform infrastructures, and evolving media practices are reshaping life beyond metropolitan centers. Although media scholarship has long privileged urban spaces, this volu ... more

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Relational Futures: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Bronwyn Carlson, Tamika Worrell

Macquarie University (2026), 30 pp.

"Artificial intelligence must be governed as a relational and institutional force, not simply a technical system. Effective policy requires Indigenous leadership, enforceable standards, and a commitment to sovereignty, accountability, and community wellbeing. Failure to act risks embedding inequalit ... more

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Handbook of Global Oral History
Deep Insights

Mark Cave, Selma Leydesdorff (eds.)

Leiden: Brill (2026), x, 699 pp.

"The Handbook of Global Oral History inspires the reader to be more open in their conception of what oral history is and how it is applied within a variety of disciplines to unlock meaning in human experience. The book brings together scholars from around the world in the areas ranging from memory s ... more

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World Happiness Report 2026: Happiness and Social Media

John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Lara B. Aknin, Shun Wang (eds.)

Oxford: University of Oxford, Wellbeing Research Centre (2026), 268 pp.

"TRENDS IN GLOBAL HAPPINESS • Nordic countries lead the happiness rankings once again. Finland is still in a group of one at the top, followed by a group of three: Iceland, Denmark, and Costa Rica. Sweden and Norway complete the top six, followed by the Netherlands, Israel, Luxembourg, and Switze ... rland to round out the top ten. Costa Rica’s rise to 4th marks the highest ever ranking for a Latin American country. • Looking at changes in happiness from the 2006–2010 base period to 2023–2025, nearly twice as many countries have had significant gains (79) than significant losses (41), among the 136 countries ranked. • Within that period, most of the 21 countries that have gained a point or more on the 0–10 life evaluation scale are in Central and Eastern Europe, reflecting the convergence in European happiness levels that has been clear for more than a decade. Most of the eight countries with drops of more than one point are in or near zones of major conflict. • In general, most Western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010. Fifteen of them have had significant drops, compared to four with significant increases. • In a ranking of happiness changes for under-25s, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (the NANZ region) rank between 122 and 133 in the list of 136 countries. • In eight of the ten global regions shown in Figure 2.2 (covering roughly 90% of the world’s population), those in the youngest age group have higher life evaluations now than in 2006–2010, either in absolute terms or relative to those over 25. Youth wellbeing has only fallen in the NANZ countries and Western Europe, both absolutely and relative to adults. • Negative emotions are becoming more common in all global regions. They are less frequent for the young, except for NANZ, where the increases, relative to other regions, were in sadness. Worry rose more broadly for the young, while the frequency of anger fell everywhere, for young and old alike. • Positive emotions continue to be twice as frequent as negative emotions. In all regions, they are higher for those born recently than for their elders, except for NANZ, where that gap has closed in recent years. HAPPINESS AND SOCIAL MEDIA • Life satisfaction is highest at low rates of social media use and lower at higher rates of use, according to data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) covering seven internet activities for 15-year-old students in 47 countries (but not the NANZ countries, unfortunately). • Internet activities fall into two groups. Communications, news, learning, and content creation are associated with higher life satisfaction. Social media, gaming, and browsing for fun are associated with lower life evaluations. • All internet activities are associated with lower life satisfaction at very high rates of use, especially for girls and for those in the UK and Ireland, the two English-speaking countries in PISA. • Data from Latin America reveal that the type of platform is crucial. Platforms designed to facilitate social connections show a clear positive association with happiness, whereas those driven by algorithmically curated content tend to demonstrate a negative association at high rates of use. • When combined, the PISA and Gallup data show significantly higher youth wellbeing in countries that spend more time using the internet for communication, and insignificantly lower youth wellbeing in countries with higher average hours of social media use. Latin American countries combine high levels 6 World Happiness Report 2026 of social media use with high youth wellbeing, while English-speaking countries show lower youth wellbeing than their fairly typical patterns of internet use can explain. • The prevalence and use patterns for social media are similar in all countries, but their links to life evaluations are stronger in English- speaking countries and Western Europe. These differences do not account for the large drops in youth wellbeing in these countries, however. Much, no doubt, depends on how social media is used and the broader social and economic context. • When school belonging goes from low (10th percentile) to high (90th percentile), the life satisfaction gains for girls in the UK and Ireland are four times greater than social media use going from high (90th percentile) to low (10th percentile). In PISA’s 47-country global sample, the belonging effect is six times larger. This should be relevant when policy options are being considered. SOCIAL MEDIA IS HARMING ADOLESCENTS AT A SCALE LARGE ENOUGH TO CAUSE CHANGES AT THE POPULATION LEVEL • Is social media use reasonably safe for children and adolescents? We call this the “product safety question”, and we present seven lines of evidence showing that the answer is no. • The evidence of harm is found in: 1) surveys of young people; 2) surveys of parents, teachers, and clinicians; 3) contents from corporate documents; 4) findings from cross-sectional studies; 5) findings from longitudinal studies; 6) findings from social media reduction experiments; and 7) findings from natural experiments. • We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as cyberbullying and sextortion), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression). Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level. • We further argue that when these lines of evidence are considered alongside the timing, scope, and cross-national trends in adolescent wellbeing and mental health, they can help answer a second question: was the rapid adoption of always-available social media by adolescents in the early 2010s a substantial contributor to the population-level increases in mental illness that emerged by the mid 2010s in many Western nations? We call this the “historical trends question”. We draw on our findings about the vast scale of harm uncovered while answering the product safety question to argue that the answer to the historical trends question is “yes”. (Executive summary, pages 6-7) more

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Children’s rights under pressure in a digital world: Proceedings of the International Communication Association pre-conference held in Cape Town, South Africa

Kim Ringmar Sylwander, Gaval Shekhawat, Sonia Livingstone (eds.)

Digital Futures for Children Centre; London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); 5Rights Foundation (2026), 181 pp.

"This collection offers conceptual and empirical support for children's rights in digital environments. In this way, this work helps bridge the gap between the child rights principles embedded in General comment No. 25, and practice. The anthology is split into five sections: participation, regulati ... more

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Living with Misinformation: A Media Literacy Approach

Tanya Notley, Michael Dezuanni, Sora Park, T. J. Thomson, Aimee Hourigan

London; New York: Routledge (2026), x, 114 pp.

"This book investigates how media literacy can be used to help people understand, identify and respond to online misinformation. Drawing on a three‑year research study that examined the everyday media experiences and abilities of more than 4,400 adults, this book presents an in‑depth look at how ... more

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Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, Volume 3

Stuart Allan, Einar Thorsen (eds.)

New York et al.: Peter Lang (2026), xii, 372 pp.

"This third volume of Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives seeks to build upon the agenda set in motion by the first and second volumes, namely by: 1) offering an overview of key developments in citizen journalism since 2014, including the use of social media in crisis reporting; 2) providing a n ... more

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Disinformation: A Multi-Disciplinary Analysis
Deep Insights

Lisa Ginsborg, Paula Gori (eds.)

Cham: Springer (2026), xvi, 654 pp.

"This volume provides a multidisciplinary analysis of disinformation and strategies for tackling it. Authored by a diverse group of scholars and experts, chapters in this volume are divided into three thematic sections. The first section delves into disinformation from various disciplinary perspecti ... more

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The Sage Handbook of Chinese Digital Media and Communication
Deep Insights

Jian Xu, Shaohua Guo, Weiyu Zhang (eds.)

London; Thousan Oaks (Cailf.) et al.: Sage (2026), 800 pp.

"Spanning activism, governance, labor, industry, everyday life, and research methods, the handbook offers a critical and interdisciplinary survey of the field. It explores how the internet and digital media have reshaped political participation, civil society, and national identity; how state regula ... more

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WorldCat (264)

Community Media, Sustainability and Crisis Lessons from Covid and Beyond

Andrew Ó Baoill, Salvatore Scifo (eds.)

Bloomsbury Academic (2026), 214 pp.

"This original collection draws on a truly global set of perspectives, with authors from Asia, Europe, Africa, and both North and South America, who explore a range of ideological, political, economic, and cultural factors that shape how community media projects respond to crises. Contributors analy ... more

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Shaping Global Cultures Through Screenwriting: Women Who Write Our Worlds

Rose Ferrell, Rosanne Welch (eds.)

Bristol: Intellect (2025), 658 pp.

"This volume, Shaping Global Cultures through Screenwriting: Women Who Write Our Worlds, tells stories of women who have worked with and within communities to bring the communities’ stories to life through screenwriting. In gathering these examples, we asked for stories that achieved some level ... of impact for the communities. Impact was considered across a number of indices. We wanted to show that attitudes have shifted, policies have been rewritten and the life experiences and ranges of possibility for some have changed for the better as a result of women’s work. We hope to show through our stories that film can change lives; that sharing stories matters; and that women are everywhere, using their skills in screen production for the good of many. In her excellent book, Women in the International Film Industry: Policy Practice and Power, Susan Liddy (2020) offers ‘a wide-ranging, critical assessment of practice, policy and progress’ to establish the range and scale of gender inequality that currently exists in the world of screen production. She quotes O’Neill and Domingo (2015) to point out that social, economic and political conditions vary, and ‘combine in different ways to enable or constrain women’s agency and leadership’ in screen production (Liddy 2020: 1). In contrast, our book approaches the same problem from the opposite perspective: we seek to correlate the ‘policy, practice and power’ (Liddy 2020) with the actual work of women screenwriters. Our aim is to point out what women screenwriters, creators and filmmakers are doing in disparate corners of the world, and how their effort is positively impacting communities, shaping culture and creating change. We argue that, despite the fact that women screenwriters are underrepresented in leadership roles in film industries worldwide, the impact of their films remains visible and palpable. We provide evidence that, as women step into the roles of screenwriter, filmmaker and collaborator, using known and emerging technologies, formats and genres under the broad scope of ‘screen production’, they raise the voices of other women and other communities. This volume shows the impact of women’s voices in creating real change for the communities whose stories are told through the topics and themes of these women’s screen works. Not least, this volume seeks to celebrate these women and their communities and bring awareness of that impact to broader communities worldwide." (Introduction, page 1) more

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Digital repertoires: Embedded and everyday technologies in later life

Riitta Hänninen, Sakari Taipale, Laura Haapio-Kirk (eds.)

London: UCL Press (2025), 202 pp.

"Digital Repertoires explores the intersection between ageing and technology, presenting the concept of 'digital repertoire' as a powerful tool for researchers across disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, gerontology, public policy, communication studies and design. This book offers new theor ... more

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State of the Media: Fiji

ABC International Development; University of Adelaide; Pacific Media Assistance Scheme (PACMAS) (2025), 41 pp.

"The media landscape in Fiji has reached a significant milestone in its history as it embraces the freedom gained from the repeal of MIDA. Findings highlight ongoing opportunities for media industry bodies to provide targeted support for local media to effectively exercise this freedom." (Conclusion ... more

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State of the Media: Palau

ABC International Development; University of Adelaide; Pacific Media Assistance Scheme (PACMAS) (2025), 31 pp.

"Palau media continues to undergo significant developments as it adjusts to increased digitisation and a move away from traditional print media. Media organisations face challenges in creating financially sustainable business models to support this shift. While media freedom is protected in Palau, o ... more

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State of the Media: Tonga

ABC International Development; University of Adelaide; Pacific Media Assistance Scheme (PACMAS) (2025), 38 pp.

"The media landscape in Tonga is in a state of digital transition, as it adapts to increasing audience demand for digital content and associated challenges relating to misinformation and disinformation. The findings in this report highlight how increased internet access in Tonga has transformed the ... more

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Inheritance and Inhabitants: The Material Place-Making Practices of Community Radio

Bridget Backhaus

Journal of Radio & Audio Media, volume 32, issue 1 (2025), pp. 66-81

"Community radio, a “third space” outside of commercial and state-based broadcasting, contributes to democratizing media access. Physical space plays a key role in this, yet the materiality of community radio stations is often liminal and precarious. DIY place-making practices are vital in estab ... more

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Who Makes the News? Progress on a Plateau. Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) Special Edition: 30-year Findings on Change in Gender Equality In and Through the World News Media
Deep Insights

Sarah Macharia, Maximiliano Dueñas Guzmán, Rodrigo Molina et al.

Toronto: World Association of Christian Communication (WACC); Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) (2025), 123 pp.

"This report presents the findings of the seventh iteration of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) global snapshot, based on 30,049 news articles containing 58,563 people and 26,708 news personnel in 94 countries on the 7th global monitoring day, May 6, 2025. Key Findings: 1. Thirty years a ... go, the report of the first GMMP called for a shift in coverage beyond the male-dominated realms of political and economic power. Not only has the hierarchy of “hard news” in legacy media persisted across time, it has also crossed over into digital outlets. 2. Digitalization did not bring a radical break from the patriarchal norms of traditional journalism. Instead, it continues to reinforce and amplify a news hierarchy that privileges spheres and issues centred on power, namely, those dominated by men. The challenge is threefold. First, to dismantle the “hard news” bias, second, to integrate more intentionally spaces and issues of greater concern to women, and third, to enable visibility and voice to women present in traditionally male-dominated spaces. 3. After a period of slow but steady improvement, progress toward gender parity in the news has flatlined since around 2010, failing to reach 50% in any media type. Thirty years after Beijing, women are 26% of those seen, heard, or spoken about in legacy news (29% on news websites). The needle has shifted 9 points in legacy media since 1995, and 4 points in online news during the past 10 years. Minority groups are five points more likely to be present in digital news than in legacy media. The probability of minority women being featured in the news as the main protagonists or as interviewees is two in a hundred in traditional media (3% for men) and 4% on news websites (5% for men). 4. Women’s visibility in political and economic news beats has increased significantly – by 15 points each – over the past three decades. The severe underrepresentation noted in 1995 (7% in political news, 10% in economic news) has improved. Women’s presence in sports news is abysmal, at only 15% of news subjects and sources. 5. The proportion of women providing expert testimony has grown remarkably over the decades, showing the highest increase (+7 points) in digital news since 2015. In legacy media, the gender gap in authoritative roles as experts and spokespersons has closed at a slower pace than for persons providing testimony based on popular opinion and personal experience – ordinary roles that require no specialized knowledge. 6. Patterns of gender-biased portrayal endure despite decades of change in women’s roles in the real world. Women have remained about twice as likely as men to be portrayed as victims since 2010. Historically, women were most often portrayed as victims of accidents or poverty. This pattern was overturned in 2025, with “other crime” and “domestic violence” (by intimate partners and family members) becoming the top victim categories. Women depicted as survivors in legacy media were most likely to have survived “accidents, natural disasters, poverty, and disease” in previous GMMP studies. In 2025, they are most frequently portrayed as domestic violence survivors in equal proportion to accident/disaster survivors. The over-representation of women as homemakers/parents decreased from 81% in 2000 to 73% in 2025, indicating some progress, albeit a persistent journalistic bias toward defining women by domestic roles, despite women’s current unprecedented engagement in work outside the home. Underrepresentation in occupations and in positions of power has remained consistent. The tendency to describe women by their age and physical attributes has also persisted. They have been photographed more often than men (a 7–9-point difference) over the past two decades, with qualitative analysis continuing to show patterns of sexualised portrayal [...]" (Key findings, pages 2-3) more

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Passion, purpose and pathways: A typology of volunteer motivations in community radio

Bridget Backhaus, Nat Kassel

Journal of Alternative & Community Media, volume 10, issue 1 (2025), pp. 51-71

"Community radio stations depend on the labour of volunteers to fulfil their crucial social, cultural and democratic functions. Yet volunteering is treated as purely mechanistic in much community radio literature and practice: a means to an end, a resourcing challenge or reflective of the participat ... more

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Platform journalism on YouTube: A democratic functions approach to analysing journalism on digital platforms

Christopher James Hall

Australian Journalism Review, volume 47, issue 1 (2025), pp. 97-115

"Independent youtubers who create content on political, social and economic issues attract very large audiences and are increasingly the object of study for journalism scholars. This article contributes to the literature by conducting a detailed analysis of the Australian YouTube channel friendlyjor ... more

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Talking Images: The Interface between Drawing and Writing

Silvia Ferrara, Mattia Cartolano, Ludovica Ottaviano (eds.)

New York: Routledge (2025), xiv, 250 pp.

"This innovative collection offers a holistic portrait of the multimodal communication potential of images from the Upper Paleolithic through to today, showcasing image-based creativity throughout the centuries. The volume seeks to extend the boundaries of our understanding of what language and writ ... more

Rural Media Studies: A Global Perspective Deep Insights

Handbook of Global Oral History Deep Insights

Disinformation: A Multi-Disciplinary Analysis Deep Insights

The Sage Handbook of Chinese Digital Media and Communication Deep Insights

Who Makes the News? Progress on a Plateau. Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) Special Edition: 30-year Findings on Change in Gender Equality In and Through the World News Media Deep Insights

Rural Media Studies: A Global Perspective
Deep Insights

Handbook of Global Oral History
Deep Insights

Disinformation: A Multi-Disciplinary Analysis
Deep Insights

The Sage Handbook of Chinese Digital Media and Communication
Deep Insights

Who Makes the News? Progress on a Plateau. Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) Special Edition: 30-year Findings on Change in Gender Equality In and Through the World News Media
Deep Insights