Chasing Dragons

Newcastle University Launches World Politics and Popular Culture MA Degree

I am pleased to announce that Politics at Newcastle University will be launching a new MA degree in World Politics and Popular Culture for the 2010-11 academic year. Here is the course description:

• World Politics and Popular Culture is a distinctive interdisciplinary degree programme that examines the changing dynamics of contemporary international relations in the context of the politics of the various forces shaping and shaped by popular culture. The programme focuses on key theories, policies, and events in world politics in relation to both traditional and new media. You will learn not only how to think critically about how world politics is reflected or reproduced in popular culture, but also how the politics of popular culture shape the dynamics of world politics...

The programme entails three core modules in Politics (World Politics and Popular Culture, Theories and Approaches to the Study of Politics, and a Dissertation in World Politics and Popular Culture) with 4 optional modules that can be taken from politics, cultural studies, media studies, and film.

Admission requirements are an undergraduate degree from an accredited university with at least a 2.i result--the rough equivalent in North American systems would be a B average.

Please note that 'other qualifications or relevant professional experience may also satisfy the entrance requirements. Applicants whose first language is not English require IELTS 6.5, TOEFL 575 (paper-based) or 233 (computer-based), or equivalent.'

Information on how to apply can be found here. There is no formal deadline--apart from the start of classes at the end of September--but if you are applying from overseas, securing a student visa can take several weeks depending on your circumstances.

If you'd like to talk to someone to find out more about the World Politics and Popular Culture MA, you can contact  Matt Davies, whose tremendous efforts and vision saw this through from design to implementation.

I'm also happy to field any inquiries that you may have about the programme or pursuing a MA in politics in the UK.

Disclaimer: If there are any differences between information provided here and that contained on official Newcastle University web-pages, the latter should be viewed as the authoritative source.

Collage and photo credit: DerrickT (work displayed under a Creative Commons attribution license)

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 34

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Cameron's plan to plunder the oeuvre of Simon Cowell' by Marina Hyde at guardian.co.uk

• 'Obama and Afghanistan: America's Drug Corrupted War' by Peter Dale Scott at globalresearch.ca (thanks to TransformDrugs for the link!)

• Canadian Prime Minister suspends Parliament in order to dodge investigations into a cover-up of Afghan prisoner torture and to fill Senate seats with patronage appointments unopposed at thestar.com

• 'How to Destroy the Book' by Cory Doctorow: Part I and Part II via thevarsity.ca

Have a good weekend and a happy new year!

Image credit: Temari 09

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 22

Okay, I know the weekend has passed, apart from in Canada where it's Thanksgiving. But it's been a busy week with lots going on--hence the long radio silence--and I have a pretty good streak going here with the roundup that I'd like to maintain, even with the help of some creative accounting...

This 'weekend' for you reading pleasure, there are two reviews of my book Chasing Dragons: Security, Identity, and Illicit Drugs as featured in the new online journal Global Discourse: A Developmental Journal in Politics and International Relations. You can also find my response to them in the same issue.

A big thanks to Mark, Matt, and the rest of the Global Discourse team who approached me several months back about the possibility of taking part in such a forum.

Have a good weekend!

Photo credit:  lepiaf.geo (lost in translation)

Problems Are Processes

After mentioning it several weeks ago, I've finally finished Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose's Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social, and Political Life. It is an essential collection of updated essays on everything from the death of the social to the mobilization of the consumer.

But what unites the various chapters is their concern with the ways in which problems are identified in contemporary society, the mechanisms that are used to identify them, the types of experts that are called upon, the political possibilities that arise from these configurations--of problems, mechanisms, and experts--and ultimately the relations of power that they enable.

What Miller and Rose ask us to do is to reject problems as being things with an inherent or natural substance to them. Rather they advocate that if we are going to analyze politics and understand power, we need to conceptualize problems as processes:

•  problems are not pregiven, lying there waiting to be revealed. They have to be constructed and made visible, and this construction of a field of problems is a complex and often slow process. Issues and concerns have to be made to appear problematic, often in different ways, in different sites, and by different agents…[And] the activity of problematizing is intrinsically linked to devising ways to seek to remedy it’ (14-15).

Why care about problems? Because problems are an important means of mobilizing resources and establishing authority in a society. Thus, they form the very essence of political activity. So, the next time that a problem is presented to you in the media, remember that something political is going on.

Therefore, you need ask yourself the following questions:

1. Who is defining this issue as a problem?
2. How is the issue being defined--or framed--as a problem?
3. What forms of knowledge (e.g., science, religious, economic, medical) are being used to provide an understanding of the problem and to argue for its importance?
4. Who has the problem invested with expert status or new forms of authority?
5. Are there other ways that the problem could be defined or framed? Is it even worthy of the status of a problem?

By asking these questions, you will be able to form an initial basis for the kind of critical engagement that is currently in short supply in contemporary political discourse.

Photo credit: psd

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 9

Apologies for being a bit negligent with posting over the past couple of days. Things have been very hectic of late--I can reveal all later.

Unfortunately, there is no theme for this weekend's reading round-up. However, please do take a look at the following, all of which will get you thinking:

• A review of Antipodes of the Mind by Benny Shannon from globeandmail.com

• Dion Dennis' 'Domestic Wars Redux: Obama, Digital Prohibition, and the New "Reefer Madness"' from ctheory.net

• Although quite old in cyber years, still an interesting read by Richard Florida on 'The Rise of the Creative Class' from washingtonmonthly.com

Have a great weekend!

Image credit for 'micro fireworks': Pixel Addict

Happy Birthday Nineteen Eighty-Four!

Henry Porter's Blog over at the guardian.co.uk notes that today marks the sixty year anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. If only unending war, intensive surveillance, and the politics of fear were once again relegated to realm of distopian fiction rather than the structural logics of everyday life.

The above photo called '1984' was taken by Andyrob and is being used under the terms of Creative Commons License.

What Have I Been Reading Lately? v. 1

One of the great things about being on research leave is having the time to work through the long list of books that you wanted to read. So, here are some of the better monographs that I have finally had the chance to read over the past term:

• Bonnie Honig (2001) Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton University Press). A compelling exploration of how the presence of the archetypal foreigner haunts democratic thought.

• Nikolas Rose (2007) The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press). Although focused on biomedicine, the argument in this book provides a groundbreaking assessment of the rationalities underpinning contemporary society.

• Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (1973) How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (International General)-->this was a reread. A classic in the field of cultural studies that was burned in Chile and banned in the United States!

• J. Bowyer Bell (2005) Assassin: Theory and Practice of Political Violence (Transaction Publishers). A type of political-historical analysis not usually seen these days with vignettes of specific assassinations used to underline broader dynamics with respect to political violence.

• Francois Debrix (2008) Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics (Routledge). Challenging and provocative: you will never engage with popular discourses of politics the same way after reading this book.

Currently, I am in the midst of reading Antoine Bousquet's (2009) The Scientific Way of Warfare (Hurst) an absolutely fascinating account of how 'throughout the modern era the dominant corpus of scientific ideas has been reflected in the contemporary theories and practices of warfare in the Western world' (3).

In the hopper, I have:

• Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (2008) Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life (Polity)

• Michael Dillon and Julian Reid (2009) The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (Routledge).

It's a really good time to be researching the things that I'm interested in!

The photo 'Timeless Books' by Lin Pernille is being used under the terms of a Creative Commons license.