Exploring the potential of the popular culture and world politics agenda: actors, artefacts and the everyday

ABSTRACT

The PCWP agenda has contributed a great deal to the discipline of world politics, empirically, methodologically and theoretically. However, there is scope to expand upon certain aspects of this body of scholarship. In particular, the agenda is developing some unfortunate hierarchies in its focus on high-budget ‘blockbusters’ at the expense of data from the everyday. It is displaying a lack of imagination in terms of its methodologies and forms of output, despite the aesthetic and creative nature of many of the artefacts. Finally, it is evincing a reluctance to explore representations beyond the textual or the visual, at the expense of other forms of representation, including sound, taste or, as I argue in this paper, artefactuality.

PCWP议程在实证、方法和理论上都对世界政治学领域有很大贡献。不过，在政治学的某些方面还是有拓展的空间。该议程不幸正在造成等级制，只关注高预算的重磅作品，而忽略了日常的资料。从方法论和产出形式上看，这种等级制缺乏想象力，尽管许多作品具有审美和创意性。它不愿探索文本或视觉之外的表达，牺牲了其他形式的表达如声音、味道、以及——我在本文中讲的——人工产物。

KEYWORDS:

• PCWP agenda
• textiles
• making
• artefacts
• everyday world politics

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Penny Griffin, Laura Shepherd and Will Clapton for their (as always) invaluable feedback. Thanks also to the editors of the Australian Journal of Political Science and the anonymous reviewer, who provided useful prompts to develop this piece further.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Caitlin Hamilton is an Adjunct Lecturer in Social Sciences at UNSW Sydney, and a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Australian Human Rights Institute and at the University of Sydney. She is also the Managing Editor of the Australian Journal of International Affairs. Her research interests include the Popular Culture and World Politics agenda, with a particular focus on textiles, and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. She is the co-editor of two volumes: Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, with Federica Caso (E-International Relations, 2015) and Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age, with Laura Shepherd (Routledge, 2017).