[ecrea] New book on audiences and 'offensive' television

NEW BOOK: Provocative Screens: Offended Audiences in Britain and Germany

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Provocative-Screens-Offended-Audiences-Britain/dp/3319679066

This book offers a nuanced understanding of ‘offensive’ television 
content by drawing on an extensive research project, involving in-depth 
interviews and focus groups with audiences in Britain and Germany. 
Provocative Screens asks: what makes something really offensive and to 
whom in what context? Why it offence felt so differently? And how does 
offensive content matter in public life, regulation, and institutional 
understandings?

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, November 2017

Authors: Ranjana Das is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at 
the University of Surrey, UK.Anne Graefer is Lecturer in Media Theory at 
Birmingham City University, UK.

“Offensive media can be upsetting or funny, sought after or avoided, 
provocative or banal. While regulators debate whether they should be 
restricted, Das and Graefer reveal that audiences’ responses - variously 
ethical or evasive – concern less the offensive media than the often 
hurtful world thereby depicted. In so doing, they also reveal the 
importance of actually consulting the public on whose behalf so many 
venture to speak.” (Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and 
Political Science, UK)

“A perennial delight of good audience research is the way it shows how 
issues judged ‘simple and obvious’ by the loudest voices in our culture 
are in fact complex and variable.  This book does that in spades with 
the current fetish of ‘offence’.  Das and Graefer prove the need to move 
the debate away from simple oppositions of ‘free speech’ versus ‘harmful 
talk’. And then do it.” (Martin Barker, University of Aberystwyth, Wales)

“The so-called ‘right to offend’ and its corollary, the right to take 
offence has become one of the most heated, and divisive of debates 
across modern political, social and cultural life. Ranjana Das and Anne 
Graefer’s Provocative Screens makes an especially important and timely 
intervention in this vexed terrain by demonstrating the layers of 
complexity and ambiguity that lie behind superficially polarised and 
polarising arguments around the freedom of speech in the 21st century. 
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary 
audience research and the cultural politics of offence.” (John Mercer, 
Birmingham City University, UK)

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