In Meanings of Audiences: Comparative Discourses, a Routledge paperback book edited by Richard Butsch and Sonia Livingstone, you'll find an interesting collection of original, empirical studies of discourses about various international audiences. The volume features essays on audiences in ancient Greece, early modern Germany, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Zimbabwe, contemporary Egypt, Bengali India, China, Taiwan, and Belgium.
Each chapter examines how audiences are embedded in written and spoken discussions and debates on power, representation, and regulation in different but overlapping ways, and according to particular socio-historical contexts. The book uses comparative and historical insights to make sense of the ways in which audiences are constituted, defined, considered, treated, influenced, and recreated. The individual contributors and Butsch and Livingstone as editors show that the branding of audiences as masses, public, citizens, and consumers sheds light on underlying patterns of social control and classification. Appropriate for undergraduate and postgraduate students alike, the book will be especially helpful to people studying audiences and international media.
2. Publics and Audiences in Ancient Greece by David Kawalko Roselli
3. When Curiosity Met Printing: Audiences and New Media in Early Modern History by Christian Oggolder
4. Shoppers, Dupes and other Types: The Television Audience in Post-Soviet Russian Discourses by Sudha Rajagopalan
5. Between Unruliness and Sociality: Discourses on Diasporic Cinema Audiences for Turkish and Indian Films by Kevin Smets, Iris Vandevelde, Philippe Meers, Roel Vande Winkel, and Sofie Van Bauwel
6. Producing Loyal Citizens and Entertaining Volatile Subjects: Imagining Audience Agency in Colonial Rhodesia and Post-colonial Zimbabwe by Wendy Willems
7. A Consuming Public: Movie Audiences in the Bengali Cultural Imaginary by Manishita Dass
8. "The Mass Wants This!" How Politics, Religion and Media Industries Shape Discourses about Audiences in the Arab World by Joe F. Khalil
9. Egyptian Audiences of Musalsalat in the Eye of the Beholder by Aliaa Dawoud
10. Senior Audiences and the Revolutionary Subject in the People's Republic of China by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald
11. The Articulation of Audience in Chinese Communication Research by Guiquan Xu
12. From Qunzhong to Guanzhong: The Evolving Conceptualization of Audience in Mainland China by Jingsi Christina Wu
13. Active Citizenship: The Politics of Imagining Internet Audiences in Taiwan by Fang-Chih Irene Yang and Ping Shaw
Sonia Livingstone is a professor at the Department of Media and Communications, LSE. In her research, she studies children, young people, and the Internet, as well as media and digital literacy, the mediated public sphere, audience reception, and the public understanding of communications regulation. She has written 16 books, including Making Sense of Television (1998), Audiences and Publics (2005), The Handbook of New Media (2006), Media Consumption and Public Engagement (2010), and Media Regulation (2012).