Deepa Kumar is an Associate Professor of Journalism

Journalism

Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

 and Media Studies

Media studies

Media studies is an academic discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history and effects of various media; in particular, the 'mass media'. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly from its core disciplines of mass...

 at the Rutgers University

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

 (New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

). She is the author of the book Outside the Box: Corporate Media

Mass media

Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...

, Globalization

Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...

, and the UPS

United Parcel Service

United Parcel Service, Inc. , typically referred to by the acronym UPS, is a package delivery company. Headquartered in Sandy Springs, Georgia, United States, UPS delivers more than 15 million packages a day to 6.1 million customers in more than 220 countries and territories around the...

 Strike.

Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike

Outside the Box (ISBN 0-252-03172-5, University of Illinois Press) looks at the need for a critical analysis of how labor struggles are presented and packaged by the corporate media—and how this bias can be counteracted—by examining the most successful national strike in recent years by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters against the United Parcel Service

United Parcel Service

United Parcel Service, Inc. , typically referred to by the acronym UPS, is a package delivery company. Headquartered in Sandy Springs, Georgia, United States, UPS delivers more than 15 million packages a day to 6.1 million customers in more than 220 countries and territories around the...

. Ron Carey

Ron Carey (labor leader)

Ronald Robert Carey was an American labor leader who served as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1991 to 1997. He was the first Teamster General President elected by a direct vote of the membership...

 the former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters has praised the book calling it "A brilliant analysis of the UPS strike, its treatment in the media, and how the Teamsters were able to win public support. It offers valuable lessons, and is a must read for everyone in the labor movement" while the Journal of Communication has been quoted as saying "Not only a significant contribution to the field but also a practical guide to how organized labor can intervene and enact social change in a still severely compromised public arena."

Danish cartoons

Following the Danish

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

 Cartoon Controversy which depicted the Islamic Prophet

Prophet

In religion, a prophet, from the Greek word προφήτης profitis meaning "foreteller", is an individual who is claimed to have been contacted by the supernatural or the divine, and serves as an intermediary with humanity, delivering this newfound knowledge from the supernatural entity to other people...

 Muhammed in a negative light, Kumar wrote an article against the publication of the cartoons titled 'Danish Cartoons: Racism Has No Place on the Left'. Her article on the Danish controversy attracted criticism, and in response Kumar wrote another article in the Monthly Review, titled "Fighting Islamophobia: A Response to Critics".

External links

• Deepa Kumar talks about her book "Outside the Box" mp3 from July 10, 2008 in Sacramento, CA