Newly Published; Gary Watt, The Making Sense of Politics, Media, and Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023) @CambridgeUP @Warwick_Law

Newly published:

Gary Watt, University of Warwick, The Making Sense of Politics, Media, and Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023) (Law in Context).

Here from the publisher’s website is a description of the book’s contents.

• From Trump’s ‘make America great again’ to Johnson’s ‘build back better’, performative politicians use The Making Sense to persuade their public audiences. Law ‘makers’ do it too: A courtroom trial is a ‘truth factory’ in which facts are not found but forged. The ‘court of popular opinion’ is another such factory, though its processes are often flawed and its products faulty. Where courts of law aim to make civil peace, ‘trial by Twitter’ makes civil strife. Even in ‘mainstream’ media, journalists make news for public consumption, so that all news is to an extent ‘fake news’. In a world of making, how can we separate craft from craftiness? With insights from disciplines including law, politics, rhetoric, media studies, psychology, sociology, marketing, and performance studies, The Making Sense of Politics, Media, and Law offers a constructive way to approach controversies from transgender identity to cancel culture. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

  • Offers the general and scholarly reader an engaging and fresh way to navigate contemporary controversies by appreciating the practices through which social facts and truths are made
  • Brings new perspectives to a range of academic disciplines (law, politics, media, rhetoric, performance, theatre, psychology, sociology etc) by reading them in terms of an integrated sense of making (encompassing such distinct aspects as invention, creation, and production)
  • Employs extensive topical examples and references to popular media, including hit television shows, film, theatre, documentaries, social media to illustrate the pervasiveness of rhetorical performance in everyday, social, political, and legal contexts
  • This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core