Symposium ‘exploring the (multiple) futures of world politics through popular culture’

ABSTRACT

Bringing popular culture and world politics together yields multiple advantages, including shifting where the ‘political’ is located and expanding conventional understandings of policy and policy communities. It matters that researchers expand what is considered necessary for understanding the socio-political world, that they challenge hierarchical assumptions of where world politics happens and that they reconsider what and whose knowledge counts. Taking popular culture seriously ‘creates new spaces for critical reflection’ (Federica Caso and Caitlin Hamilton [2015]. Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies. Bristol: E-International Relations, 2), spaces to which this Symposium contributes directly.

将通俗文化与世界政治放一块看有诸多好处，这包括改变“政治”的定位并拓展对政策以及政策群体的传统理解。重要的在于研究者扩大了对社会政治理解所需要的要素，在于他们挑战了世界政治在哪儿发生的等级制假设，在于他们重新思考什么知识、谁的知识才重要。严肃地对待通俗文化“为批判性反思创造的新空间”，本研讨会围观的正是这样的空间。

KEYWORDS:

• Popular culture
• world politics
• everyday

This Symposium project explores intellectual possibilities and forges possible future pathways by taking seriously the mutually reproductive relationship between popular culture and world politics. The Symposium adds to a diverse collection of international relations (IR) work that recognises popular culture as a significant site of power in world politics, describing popular culture and world politics as indivisible and mutually creative. Understanding popular culture broadly as the practices of culture in public domains, the Symposium looks closely at the confluence of practices, ideas, norms and objects embedded in the most trivial, but often under-theorised, details of daily life. It asks how thinking about popular culture creates a space in international relations for examining how people are able to interpret the world, and make it meaningful to them, according to the cultural channels available to them, and the signifying objects they produce. While popular culture is situated here as culture ‘of the people’ in the sense that it encompasses the activities and feelings produced in and by ‘ordinary’ people in relation to cultural objects, the papers gathered here also take care to capture how popular culture is both ordinary and exceptional: ordinary in its everydayness, but exceptional in its potential to support and multiply identity, social meaning and relations of power.

There are compelling reasons to examine the relationship between popular culture and world politics. In an influential article published in 2009, Grayson, Davies and Philpott write that ‘if the incorporation of popular culture into IR is going to be fruitful, there must be a willingness to go beyond an engagement with illustrations of world politics’ (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 156). That is, work on popular culture and world politics must do more than identify simple ‘allegories and metaphors that take world politics and popular culture as static structural givens’; it must examine the world politically, as embodied in human spaces, processes and relationships, and it must therefore investigate ‘the political possibilities and limits of the politics produced and/or shaped by popular culture’ (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 156–157). Grayson, Davies and Philpott ask their readers to see popular culture and world politics as a continuum, with each ‘implicated in the practices and understandings of the other’ (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 158). Viewed as such, the study of popular culture and world politics, they argue, achieves several outcomes, including, inter alia, shifting where the ‘political’ is located, changing how politics and international relations are understood as sights, sites and cites of power and expanding conventional understanding of policy and policy communities to consider true multiplicities of cultural producers (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009, 158–160).

This Symposium takes on Grayson et al.’s challenge, confronting ‘the political possibilities and limits of the politics produced and/or shaped by popular culture’ to answer questions about what counts, where ‘politics’ happens and whose knowledge matters in world politics. These include consideration of the significance of the actual making of culture, practice and representation in world politics (Hamilton, this issue), the gendered insecurities of the post-truth era and their affective power (Duncombe, this issue), the productive, social power of the gendered embodiment of militarised videogaming (Berents and Keogh, this issue), the power of ‘popular’ stories of power and privilege in the global political economy (Griffin, this issue) and the complex, ethical co-constitution of human and non-human spaces in world politics (Clapton and Shepherd, this issue). Each of the papers, in different ways, displays the potential that popular culture-informed analysis offers international relations, pushing forward research about world politics through the clever use of cultural sources that speak to what we do know, what we can know and what we might know about the world.

World politics through popular culture, so far

The study of world politics, practiced through methods attentive to popular culture, has yielded considerable insight into social, political and economic life in global perspective. Popular culture research has pushed international relations away from its more static ‘macro-political analyses’, which are often ‘focused on systemic relations between states’ (Caso and Hamilton 2015, 2), and has challenged researchers and practitioners, students and interested parties to destabilise cosy assumptions about what ‘counts’ in world politics. With a long provenance in the arts, humanities and social sciences, the study of popular culture is now well established as significant in and to world politics (Weldes and Rowley 2015, 12), its study a vibrant and growing part of international relations (Caso and Hamilton 2015, iii; Weldes and Rowley 2015, 12).

Emerging from the ‘aesthetic’ turn in political science in the 1990s, popular culture research evinces a concern to investigate the somatic, lived experiences of real people navigating political questions and systems. Aesthetic approaches to world politics have been concerned with foregrounding, and are about generating, alternative approaches to, and therefore understandings of, phenomena that are more complex than they might appear to be (see Bleiker 2001, 2009). They take seriously the knowledge to be gleaned from embodied, somatic, sensory and representative analysis. In particular, Roland Bleiker’s work has been pivotal in showing how aesthetic approaches to world politics are creative undertakings that tend to create reflexive insights. For popular culture research, practices of the ‘popular’ vary, but are always ‘sites where politics takes place’ (Grayson, Davies, and Philpott 2009). As Clapton and Shepherd (2016) note, popular culture affects how people learn about world politics, while the discrete organisation of international relations knowledge (realism, liberalism, constructivism, poststructuralism, et al.) is rarely, in real life, neatly bounded. Cultural artefacts such as books, TV shows, performances, art, movies, music, videogames and so on may uphold certain foundational logics about, for example, gendered political authority or sovereign power, and they are also equally likely to challenge existing divisions of knowledge and enable new and contrary ways of thinking about the world.

Popular culture has been shown to matter in and to world politics in several, important, ways. Weldes and Rowley (2015) pay particular attention to these. Perhaps most obviously, there are the ways in which states, as political units, deploy popular culture as propaganda, for example, in times of war and also in peace (Weldes and Rowley 2015, 13–15). There is the industrialised production and consumption of popular culture that make popular culture always ‘already enmeshed in both the IPE disciplinary landscape and the fabric of international political economic practices’ (Weldes and Rowley 2015, 15). Similarly, global flows, of capital technology, development, democracy, and so on, can ‘be problematised through the lens(es) of popular culture’ (Weldes and Rowley 2015, 17–18). There is also the intimate relationship between knowledge (about world politics) and the representations of key components of world politics that circulate through popular culture (18–20). Everyday and official knowledge is often (always) mediated: representations, for example, in Hollywood films of English aristocrats, Middle Easterners, US soldiers and brown women are both reflective and constitutive of powerful assumptions of what people are and how they should be treated. Popular culture wields a power ‘to shape political identities and the narratives that sustain them’ (Duncombe and Bleiker 2015, 36) that is unmatched in the modern world (as evidenced in disturbing videos of ISIS beheadings explicitly modelled on US television shows, negative Hollywood representations of Middle Easterners, British tabloid coverage of seas of male refugee ‘invaders’, and so on). Lastly, practices of consumptions are cultural practices ‘interconnected with all sorts of political discourses and choices’ and are constitutive of the relationship between popular culture and world politics’ (Weldes and Rowley 2015, 21). In short, popular culture offers a dizzying array of choices for what to study, where and how, each of which have implications for how we understand the power of the actors, processes, practices and systems of world politics.

Aims of the symposium

In light of the enormity of this potential, this Symposium has both modest and ambitious aims. In the first instance, it asks its readers to consider that some (indeed, a lot) of what they know about the world, and world politics, is shaped by popular culture. To those immersed in research that takes seriously sensory, affective and representative practices and effects, to judge popular culture a practice of meaning-making in world politics is an easy task. But to others, less embedded in alternative political methods, this might be a more difficult endeavour, challenging the coherence of a worldview that may have been built on assumptions about disciplinary origins, key actors, core practices and systemic constraints that can be shown to be unsustainable. While popular culture is now undoubtedly a genuine presence in IR, creative of various innovative and valuable research agendas therein, it remains fair to say that the political sciences, including the disciplines of international relations and international political economy, have struggled, theoretically, conceptually, and methodologically, to make sense of its significance in and to their work. This Symposium hopes to push the popular culture agenda forward, building on a growing body of critically-inclined, methodologically eclectic and politically attentive research to show exactly how valuable research springs from still unusual origins. The Symposium asks, not that readers look to reject certain academic cultures, achievements and practices, but that they open their minds, if only a tiny bit, to the possibilities afforded by seeing the world through lenses that highlight rather than obscure powerful representational practices.

The second aim, perhaps more ambitiously, of the Symposium is to propel discussion of the locations of power, morality, interest and identity in politics and international relations through discussion of popular culture. Constituting a uniquely Australian collection of scholarship on popular culture and world politics, each paper provides creative and concrete avenues for engagement with world politics and its possible future pathways, pushing forward discussion in important ways, and via rigorous methods attuned to engaging with an uncertain global environment. In relative terms, Australian academics make up a small but growing corpus of scholarship on popular culture and world politics, and Australia is home to talented researchers who are well-versed in the research practices both of international relations and popular culture. Bringing together some of these exciting voices, this Symposium showcases the work of junior and more established scholars committed to timely and critically incisive engagement with the shape, effects and future pathways of post-positivist research methodologies in politics and international relations. While the papers each deal with different aspects of popular culture and world politics, they cohere as critical assessments both of input (the variety of things that make world politics what it is) and output (the effects, outcomes and impacts of particular political strategies, moments and contexts).

Approach of the symposium

This Symposium showcases some of the insights offered by interpretive popular culture approaches to world politics, with authors engaging here in imaginative ways and through varied approaches that are especially apposite to contemporary, ‘post-truth’ (as Duncombe articulates in this issue) politics. Papers start at the bottom, so to speak, focusing on ‘alternative’ sources of knowledge, such as films, television, music, videogames and social media, to answer important political questions, for example, about ethics, populism, war, violence and economy. Each paper uses its own tools of analysis to account for the intersections, for example, between war-making, gender and political economy, the nature of human ethics and political responsibility, the rupture of political form and identity, the role of knowledge creation and the failures of disciplinary practice, the key normative content of world politics as a contested space, and the weaknesses of approaches to research that inhibit plural (and pluralist) understandings of meaning, knowledge and power. The papers here do this as a means to unpack the ‘big’ questions in world politics through attention to ‘small’ details; that is, asking questions about security, conflict, economy, justice, nationalism, identity and dissent in reference to the minutiae of social, cultural and political reproduction, embodiment, representation and subjectivity. Highlighting how practices of interpretation are invariably carried out at multiple levels in world politics (some of which are elite, opaque and inaccessible), the papers here show how people encounter the textures of world politics (what they see, hear, touch, smell and taste about the world) through personal and subjective but also inherently political experiences, which in turn create significant political and collective ramifications. The papers reveal that these more intimate aspects of world politics can be analysed politically and carefully as having powerful, and pervasive, repercussions for the practices of ‘official’ world politics.

As a collection, the Symposium asks three specific and related questions:

• How can engaging with popular culture create knowledge of what is represented, obscured, produced and consumed in world politics?

• How might researchers ‘reconfigure the boundaries and challenge the hierarchies of knowledge production’ (Clapton and Shepherd, this issue) that prevent disciplines, such as international relations and international political economy, from fully understanding how meaning is constructed, identities created, and power and politics reproduced?

• What are the consequences for how politics and international relations can be understood, now and in the future, when popular culture is taken seriously as a site of knowledge-making?

Symposium themes

These questions are answered in different ways by the papers collected here, and speak to three key themes emergent in this Symposium.

The first concerns the role of popular culture as both a source of knowledge about world politics and a method for viewing world politics. Relinquishing ‘a unitary standard of evidence’, of course, ‘violates social scientific conventions’ (Bleiker 2015, 872), and ‘alternative’ political science methodologies, such as those that explore visual, oral, aural and emotional languages, can be controversial. Research into and on popular culture touches often-raw nerves, especially concerning who, what and where matters. Such research has also, intentionally but sometimes accidentally, destabilised the mythologies that have rendered disciplines, such as international relations, coherent. In international relations, for example, myths of origin, such as primordial European wars and ideational ‘battlefields’ consisting largely of dead white men, have long been foundational. These myths have been ‘told and retold to each new intake of IR scholars, eager to dress up in the costume of legitimacy and authenticity afforded to the discipline by the myths’ (Moore and Shepherd 2010, 300). While international relations scholars do not universally welcome the turn to popular culture upon which this Symposium draws, it is worth noting that, as Moore and Shepherd (2010, 303–304) describe, canonical figures in international relation’s history, figureheads such as E. H. Carr and Kenneth Waltz, deploy references to art and artistic work and use artistic sources.

The second theme relates to studies of popular culture and their relationship with investigations into the politics of the everyday. While not the same thing, and not interchangeable, popular culture and the politics of the everyday are intimately linked, and mutually constitutive. The complexity of conflict, economic crises, the politics of development, postcolonialism, peacebuilding, migration, and so on, exist at everyday levels and render the practices of knowledge creation more complex than many theories of international relations assume. Popular culture is also, of course, not only created and reproduced at everyday levels, and people’s experience of everyday life (homes, social spaces, workplaces, recreational pursuits, forms and practices of care, health and wellbeing, and so on) are neither uniform or universal. Both popular culture and everyday politics do, however, involve thinking about how cultural products are made, used, interpreted and passed on by real people. This includes reflecting on who has the power to make and reproduce the artefacts, and across whose lives these artefacts intersect.

The third theme concerns thinking about the future. None of the papers here, of course, claim to predict ‘the future’, but each, in slightly different ways, points a finger at what is and can be possible for research agendas that use popular culture to think about world politics. Many, many popular culture artefacts imagine, and represent, ‘the future’, in various, not always complementary, ways. Popular culture has real consequences for how practices of international relations (war, economy, development, peace, security, and so on) are understood and imagined and how they will, in the future play out, both at elite and popular levels and across everyday and unfamiliar life. It is something of a cliché to say that how the world is imagined now matters for how the world can, and will likely, exist in the future. It has also always been the case that popular culture that deals with the ‘future’ is really about the present. The title of this Symposium (‘Exploring the [Multiple]) Futures of World Politics Through Popular Culture’) was chosen in this spirit: to emphasise that good research makes plain both what is experienced and what is possible, and that this is neither singularly felt or universally understood.

As Caso and Hamilton (2015, 2) note, ‘the advantages of bringing popular culture and world politics together are multiple’: it matters that researchers seize those advantages and build on the existent work of others to expand what is considered necessary for understanding the socio-political world (visual politics, emotionality, sound-making), to challenge hierarchical assumptions of where world politics happens (in everyday life, not just the public sphere) and what and whose knowledge counts. Taking popular culture seriously ‘reanimates debates’ in international relations ‘and creates new spaces for critical reflection’ (Caso and Hamilton 2015, 2), spaces to which this Symposium contributes.

Acknowledgements

This project has, for me, been something quite special in the making, in no small part because of the dedication, patience and beautiful writing of each of the participants here, and I thank them. Sincere thanks are due to the AJPS editors, in particular Professor Renee Jeffery, for their support, guidance and enthusiasm for this project. Special thanks are also due to Professor Roland Bleiker, who has spent some considerable time thinking about and engaging with this project, doing this with wisdom, warmth and alacrity at all times. I feel very lucky to have had the support of such people in this research endeavour.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Penny Griffin is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the School of Social Sciences at UNSW Sydney (https://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/about-us/people/penny-griffin/). She works specifically in the areas of gender and feminist studies, international political economy, international relations, global economic governance, the politics of development and the politics of visual and popular culture. Her current research examines economic governance, financial crisis and the ‘post-crisis’ period from a gender perspective. She has published with Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan (Gendering the World Bank, 2009, winner of the 2010 BISA International Political Economy Group book prize) and in the journals Politics, Feminist Review, Men and Masculinities, Globalizations, New Political Economy and Review of International Political Economy. Her 2015 book, Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism: Why Women Are in Refrigerators and Other Stories, is available through Routledge’s ‘Popular Culture and World Politics’ book series (https://www.routledge.com/Popular-Culture-and-World-Politics/book-series/PCWP).