Chasing Dragons

Call for Papers: Popular Culture and World Politics v. 6

Popular Culture and World Politics Conference v. 6

Pirating the Popular

Stockholm University, September 13-14, 2013

Call for Papers

Abstracts should be submitted to 

abstractspcwp@statsvet.su.se.

Please indicate in the subject box in your email message

 "Abstract for PWPC". 

This will ensure proper handling of your abstract.

Keynote speeches by

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Family Professor 

University of Virginia

and

Elisa Kreisinger, well-known activist and artist 

Conference deadlines

• Suggestions for panels and performances – May 1, 2013
• Paper abstracts – June 1, 2013

Please note that there will be a modest conference fee. 

More information later.

The study of world politics and popular culture is now an 

established area of interest for many disciplines in the 

social sciences, humanities and the arts. Popular culture 

relates to contemporary politics in numerous ways: It can 

offer expression that soothes and humours the soul. It can 

satirize and play off cultural resonance to resist powerful or 

repressive forces. And it can stimulate political or 

community engagement, as demonstrated clearly in the role 

that music and performative satire played in the Arab 

Uprisings and  in the Occupy activities around the world.

This conference addresses the multiple ways in which popular 

culture engages with world affairs. It  takes as its starting 

point the observation that we live in an age of interregnum - 

a time where the old institutions and old rules no longer 

function sufficiently and new ones have not yet taken their 

place. 

Ours is an age where processes of globalisation are 

contributing to the ‘divorce’ of politics from power, 

resulting in what  Zygmunt Bauman identifies as a 

‘liquid modernity’ of endemic uncertainty.’ This 

uncertainty about authority and interpretation - 

compounded by ubiquitous connectivity and audio-visual media - 

gives rise to power struggles, problematizes the ability to 

judge relationships between cause and effect, provides new 

opportunities for political engagement and changes the 

foundations on which authority rests.

Hosting this conference in Stockholm seems particularly 

timely given Sweden’s various, if not contradictory, 

interventions in the ambiguous world of popular culture: 

from the foundation of The Pirate Bay to the Wikileaks case, 

from a culture of  ‘free viewing’ to Spotify’s corporate  

entrepreneurialism, from strongholds in Marxist media theory 

to Facebook’s Swedish server farms, and many more.

The general theme Pirating the Popular covers a broad range 

of practices concerning the complex, dubious and dynamic 

nature of popular culture in world politics. We welcome

 proposals for papers, panels, performances and screenings 

addressing the many different aspects of world politics and 

popular culture that are evoked by the metaphor of piracy.

Themes for papers and panels could include:

• The politics of consumerism and commercial exploitation
• Labour policies and regulation in popular culture industries
• The role of popular culture in protest movements and ‘non-movements’
• The militarization of popular culture (militainment)
• The role of popular culture in nation-branding
• Surveillance and the securitization of the digital landscape
• Popular culture and the politics of citizenship
• The role of popular culture in the MENA region before, during and after the Arab spring
• Cultural globalisation: mediated control and resistance
• Illegal trafficking or migrating media?
• Transnational media witnessing
• Transnational news and popular culture
• The politics of local and regional popular cultures
• Music and politics
• Visual culture and globalisation
• Methodological approaches to popular culture and world politics
• Popular culture and political scandals

Conference conveners:
Michele Micheletti (Lars Hierta Chair of Political Science) 

michele.micheletti@statsvet.su.se

Kristina Riegert (Professor of Media and Communication 

Studies), kristina.maj.riegert@ims.su.se

The official conference website can be found here

Photo credit: Adobe of Chaos

Call for Papers: Power, Popular Culture and World Politics

Call for Papers

1st European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS)

5-8 June, 2013, Tartu

Power, Popular Culture, and World Politics (Workshop #10)

Deadline for Proposals: 15 December, 2012

I am convening a four day workshop on popular culture and world politics (PCWP) as part of the European International Studies Association's 1st European Workshops in International Studies. The workshop will be held in Tartu, Estonia from 5-8 June 2013.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers in order to explore the state of the art in aesthetic, phenomenological, and representational explorations of contemporary relations of power as well as best practices in teaching these approaches to PCWP.

The workshop particularly seeks papers that:

• critically engage with the questions of whether popular culture matters in world politics, how it might matter, to whom it might matter, and how its myriad influences might be assessed or perceived?
• explore methodological issues in PCWP--including aesthetic and phenomenological approaches to the analysis of artifacts and power dynamics. 
• focus on the political impacts of embodiment, affect, the material design of devices, and the modes through which contemporary media are experienced.
• analyse cultural forms as a way of problematising world politics and its supporting structures.
• share best pedagogical practice in terms of deploying popular culture in the seminar room and/or in teaching appropriate research methods for the field. 

To all of these ends, work from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences is warmly welcome.

The central organisers have stated that a workshop may accept up to 20 participants. With the four day length, this upper limit allows for extended paper presentations beyond conference norms and ensures that a significant amount of time can be dedicated to discussing each paper. From talking with colleagues who have previously attended ECPR workshops that are run along similar lines, the format is said to be very conducive to developing works-in-progress and exploring themes of common research interest.

If you are interested, you can submit a paper proposal here. Please indicate that you are applying for workshop #10 in the drop-down menu on the form.

More information on the EWIS can be found here

The registration fee is €50 (full)/€30(research students).

If you have any questions, please get in touch with me via email

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 127

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Pakistanis Rally Against Drone "Assassination Campaign"' at channel4.com

• 'Syd Hoff's Teeth: The Leftist Satire of A. Redfield' by Philip Nel at ninekindsofpie

• 'The Revolution Will be Hashtagged: The Visual Culture of the Occupy Movement' by Henry Jenkins at confessionsofanacafan

• 'The Privatisation of Public Space is Harming Our Ability to Protest' by Alex Hern at leftfootforward.org

• 'The Grotesqueness of Pop Culture Politics' by Alyssa Rosenberg at thinkprogress.org

Enjoy the weekend!

Photo credit: Dominic Alves

Evil Mickey

 

As part of the MA seminar on World Politics and Popular Culture that I co-teach with my colleagues Matt Davies and Simon Philpott, we like to analyse artifacts that we have found or that students bring in with them.

This week, Matt and I came across a provocative Japanese propaganda cartoon from 1934 that presents a not-so-distant future in which Mickey Mouse attacks Japan. It was a marvelous find.

An informative discussion of what some of the characters symbolize and a loose translation of some of the material can be found at CartoonBrew (scroll down to the comments section).

Enjoy!

Popular Culture and World Politics 4: Call for Papers

Please see the call for papers for the 4th (!) annual Popular Culture and World Politics Conference at the University of Lapland. Many thanks to Laura and Julian for organizing and hosting what will prove to be a great event!

Popular Culture and World Politics IV (PCWP 4): Call for Papers

23-25 November 2011 at University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Lapland, Finland

We study popular culture to understand the representational practices through which power relations are constructed worldwide, and grasp the aesthetic practices through which the intolerability of power relations are given political expression, and out of which new political subjectivities and peoples are brought into being. Deconstructing the former is integral to the processes of struggle by which we can contribute to the composition of the latter.

The Department of Politics and International Relations (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lapland)  is pleased to invite you to continue this effort at the Popular Culture and World Politics Conference (PCWP 4) to be held in Rovaniemi, Finland, 23-25 November 2011. The conference is the fourth in a groundbreaking series of annual events that began in the University of Bristol in 2008. Since then the series has developed into an exciting annual event which attracts scholars, practitioners and artists from throughout the world and across the disciplines and fields to debate and discuss the world politics of popular culture.

This year, the conference will be held on the ultra-northern verges of Europe, in Lapland, which occupies liminal space in-between popular imaginaries of Western modernity and Arctic wilderness.

The three-day conference will attract papers and presentations from thinkers whose work is inspiring contemporary forays into the relations between politics and culture across the humanities, social sciences and the arts. Invited keynote speakers include Michael J. Shapiro (Hawai'i), Tiziana Terranova (Napoli, Italy), and Scott Wilson (Kingston, UK).

With this Call for Papers we invite participation in all possible forms. In addition to panels and individual papers, we welcome proposals for art exhibitions, screenings, performances or other modes of expression. In so doing we hope to build the event into a rich experience which involves not only talking about popular culture but also experiencing, sensing, feeling, producing and, in most cases, enjoying it.

Suggested themes for panels, papers and other presentations include (but are not limited to):

• Challenging the theory/practice divide
• Aesthetics and the constitution of new subjectivities
• Decolonizing methodologies
• Popular culture and climate change
• The politics of Santa Claus
• Representation and race
• Senses, sensibilities and the redistribution of the sensible order
• Art and political activism
• Popularization of indigenous cultures
• Imaginaries of hope in contemporary politics
• Aesthetics of security
• War and media
• The politics of cinema
• Digital aesthetics
• The biopolitics of popular culture

All other themes will be entertained too.

If you are interested in attending the conference please Click here to submit a brief abstract of your paper, panel proposal (including the names and titles of each presentation) or artistic contribution (max. 450 words). The deadline for abstract submissions is June 30th.

More information about practical issues and forms for advance registration will be added on this website by the end of May.

For any queries about the scientific contents of the conference, please contact:
Julian Reid (julian.reid(at)ulapland.fi) and Laura Junka-Aikio (laura.junka-aikio(at)ulapland.fi)

For any queries about practical issues, please contact:
Rovaniemi-Lapland Congresses
University of Lapland
PO Box 122
96101 Rovaniemi, Finland
Tel. +358 40 484 4462 and +358 40 721 8260
Fax +358 16 362 940
Email: congress@ulapland.fi

Original site can be found here.

Image credit: Eemil Karila and Julija Goyd

Mickey Mouse Just Said 'Yes' To Drugs and Racism in 1951

Mickey Mouse just says 'yes' to speed and racism in this 1951 comic strip entitled 'Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man', available here.

The glorification of amphetamine use is certainly a change of pace from the strong anti-drug messages portrayed in contemporary children's media. However, I would argue that the racism is shocking not because of its message but rather because of its form. 

As the Guardian reported on 30 June, 2010 in an article entitled 'Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries', it would appear that the notion that 'natives' are stupid and lazy is an enduring stereotype nearly seven decades on. The difference is that rather then being casually asserted, it  now relies on pseudo-science and neo-Lamarkianism to provide rhetorical force and validation. It would appear therefore that the cultural production of racism may be returning to its nineteenth century eugenic roots...

Plus ca change, plus ce la meme chose?

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)

The Political Cartoons of Dr. Seuss

I've recently discovered an excellent catalog of editorial cartoons drawn by Theodor Geisel--aka Dr. Seuss--while he was employed by the progressive New York Newspaper PM in the early 1940s. The catalog has been archived by Richard H. Minear from the University of Massachusetts. He has a great short write up of the cartoons here as well as a full book on the topic: Dr. Seuss Goes to War.

What is surprising and unsettling is the abject levels of racism in some of the these cartoons--particularly those depicting the Japanese and Japanese-Americans-- and how these are able to cohabit with others that condemn anti-Semitism and racism against African-Americans.

Beyond the historical value of being able to view these cartoons, the catalog also has a more general importance. It demonstrates how we as 'progressives' or 'critical' scholars also need to be constantly re-examining our own presuppositions and the kind of politics that these make possible, lest we too unwittingly condone the violence of exceptions.