Abstract
While the analysis of popular culture has a long provenance in politics and international studies (see, for example, Walter Benjamin (2008 [1936]), John Tomlinson (1991), Edward Said (1993), Stuart Hall (1997), Donna Haraway (1984), Jutta Weldes (2003), Cynthia Weber (2001), and Janice A. Radway (1991)), there has recently been a renewed interest in exploring how popular culture and politics produce relations of power. Whether it be through analyses of Battlestar Galactica (e.g., Kiersey and Neumann, 2013), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Davies, 2010; Shepherd, 2013), Paddington Bear (Grayson, 2013), video games (Robinson, 2012), alien invasion films (Löfflmann, 2013), war movies (Philpott, 2010), novels (Shapiro, 2010), celebrity politics (Street, 2012), music (Baker, 2013), photography (Bleiker and Kay, 2007), or art (Danchev and Lisle, 2009), a growing body of literature argues that the power relations engendered by popular culture must be taken seriously.
While providing initial insights into the relations of power constituted by the popular culture-world politics continuum (see Grayson et al., 2009), existing research on popular culture and politics has also raised a series of important conceptual, methodological, and pedagogical questions. For example, how does popular culture matter in politics, when might it matter, to whom might it matter, and why might it matter? More precisely, in what ways can the analysis of cultural forms provide critical insight into contemporary relations of power and their underlying practices and structures? Could popular culture provide a more comprehensive understanding of political problems if only it was taken more seriously? Methodologically, how can one capture the political potential of cultural artefacts that are affective, aesthetic, embodied, and phenomenological? Do appropriate methods change with the material design of devices and the modes through which contemporary media are experienced by audiences? Pedagogically, what constitutes best practice in terms of deploying popular culture in the class room and/or for teaching appropriate research methods for the field?
In the hope of beginning to address aspects of the questions above, this special section contains a selection of articles that explore the complex intersections of power, politics, and popular culture in their theoretical, empirical, and pedagogical dimensions. Felix Rösch demonstrates how treating the Tintin series of graphic novels as texts of political theory provides us with a critically important conceptualisation of peace that foregrounds politics rather than effacing it. Similarly Mark Wheeler argues that The Wire offers an important diagnosis of what ails – and contributes to – a fractious political culture in the United States and the contemporaneous degeneration of the civic sphere.
With regards to learning and teaching, David C. Earnest and Jennifer N. Fish show how concepts from visual sociology can be combined with active forms of learning like blogging and creative practices like photography in the seminar room. More specifically, they demonstrate how these approaches can facilitate the development of a deeper appreciation amongst students of the contours and contradictions of globalisation. In the final article of this special section, Jack Holland provides crucial insight into the impacts of using video resources – including artefacts from popular culture – inside and outside of the lecture theatre to respond to students' differing abilities and needs.
By publishing this special section, we are aiming to make a contribution to the emerging field of popular culture and politics. It is our hope that these articles will encourage future work in this important area and signal that we encourage submissions to the journal on the conceptual, empirical, methodological, and pedagogical issues that arise at the nexus of popular culture and politics.