The Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication invites you to celebrate the launch of two incredibly pertinent books on October 5th.

Join us to celebrate the publication of Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt by Dean Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kathryn Claire Higgins, and The #MeToo Effect: What Happens When We Believe Women by Leigh Gilmore.

The book launch will be held in person at the Annenberg School for Communication in Room 109 and the Forum from 5:00 to 7:30pm EST and is open to the public. To be followed by a drinks reception nearby.

This event is proudly co-sponsored between the Center for Collaborative Communication (C3) and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) as a subset of their joint programming “Identity at the Limits of Representation.”

Sarah Banet-Weiser

Sarah Banet-Weiser (she/her) is the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and its Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication. In addition, she is a research professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the founding director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools (C3). Her teaching and research interests include gender in the media, identity, citizenship, and cultural politics, consumer culture and popular media, race and the media, and intersectional feminism. Committed to intellectual and activist conversations that explore how global media politics are exercised, expressed, and perpetuated in different cultural contexts, she has authored or edited eight books, including the award-winning Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2012) and Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Duke, 2018), and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and essays. She was formerly the editor of the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly, as well as co-editor of the International Communication Association journal, Communication, Culture, Critique, and was the founding co-editor of the New York University Press book series, Critical Cultural Communication Studies. Her latest book (co-authored with Kathryn Higgins), Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (Polity, 2023), explores the convergence of the #MeToo movement and the crisis of post-truth.

Kathryn Claire Higgins

Kathryn Claire Higgins (she/her) is a Lecturer in Global Digital Politics in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. A former Postdoctoral Fellow in the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication (C3), she is a critical scholar of communication, culture, and our contemporary politics of vulnerability. Her work focusses primarily on how different practices of state and social violence – from regimes of bordering, to endemic sexual assault, to the criminal legal system – are stabilized and/or contested in the terrain of media culture. Believability is her first book, and her research and writing are additionally published in Feminist Media Studies, Journalism, Television and New Media, and Visual Communication, among other outlets. She is currently writing her second book, Victimcould: Vulnerability Politics, Media, and the Imaginary Future.

For more information, please visit Annenberg's website.