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

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 181

Yes, I missed my usual Sunday deadline. But there was a really good reason as I was attending the Popular Culture and World Politics Conference v 5.0 at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

Kevin Dunn, the conference organizer, put on an excellent event, including four outstanding keynote speakers: Legs McNeil, Anne Elizabeth Moore, The Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, and Elisa Kreisinger. Thus, drawing from the keynote speakers, here is this week(end)'s reading roundup:

• 'Johnny Rotten: No More Mr. Nice Guy!' by Legs McNeil at pleasekillme

• 'Authenticating the Inauthentic' by Anne Elizabeth Moore at truthout.org

• 'Sandy Stops Our Shopping' by the Reverend Billy at revbilly.com

• 'Resources' by Elisa Kreisinger at popculturepirate.com (everything you need to know to get started on making your own video mash-ups and remixes)

Have a good week!

Video credit: 'Mad Men: Set Me Free' by @marcfaletti and @popcultpirate

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. 178

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'What Can't Be Seen in Afghanistan' by Robert Hariman at nocapitonneeded.com

• 'Imperialist Austerity' by Richard Seymour at leninology.com

• 'Foucault: Criticism, Judgement, and Assessment' by Clare O'Farrell at refractedinput

• 'Jihad Against Jihad Against Jihad' by Kendra Salois at thenewinquiry.com (hip hop and resistance in Morocco)

Enjoy the weekend.

Photo credit: iThink420

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 177

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Conflict History: All Human Conflicts on a Single Map' at infosthetics.com

• 'Technology, Norms, and Social Change' at globalsociology.com

• 'The Art of Punk and the Punk Aesthetic' by Rick Poynor at designobserver.com

• 'Drone Attacks Will Lead to Inevitable Blowback in Pakistan' by Pam Bailey at globalresearch.ca

Have a good weekend.

Photo credit: Jonathan Cohen

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 168

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Theory Talks #48: Cynthia Enloe' interviewed by Peer Schouten at theory-talks.org

• 'Flying Our Drone' by Jeremy Crampton at opengeography

• 'Sending Signals About Political Graphics' by Rick Poynor at designobserver.com

• 'Making Punk a Threat Again' by Spencer Ackerman at foreignpolicy.com  (FP once again demonstrating its total inability to understand how popular culture matters to world politics)--thanks to @mattspikedavies for the link!

Enjoy the weekend!

Photo credit: Felipe Gabaldon

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 166

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Torture by Music' podcast by Tom Robinson at bbc.co.uk (scroll down to 17 March, 2012)

• 'Inside the Mind of Mass Killers' by Daniel Lende at plos.org

• 'De-weaponization by Design' by Rob Walker at designobserver.com

• '10 Critical Questions About Fiction Depictions of Violence' by Henry Jenkins at henryjenkins.org

• 'The Messy Business of Tacos' by Jeffrey M. Pilcher at guernicamag.com

Have a good weekend.

Photo credit: Rick Payette

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 163

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'A Snitch's Dilemma' by Ted Conover at nytimes.com (corruption, surveillance, and murder in the war on drugs at a micro-level)

• 'Music: The Internet's Original Sin' by Cory Doctorow at locusmag.com

• 'Apes with Apps' by Ken Schweller at spectrumieee.org

• 'Why Do Nigerian Scammers Say They are From Nigeria?' by Cormac Herley at research.microsoft.com

• 'Drone Hijacking? That's Just the Start of GPS Troubles' by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at dangerroom

Have a good weekend!

Photo credit: William Warby

Copyfight and the Great Transformation

 

Last week I was asked by Cinema Politica Newcastle to give a post-screening talk on copyfight after a showing of RIP: A Remix Manifesto. With the extreme weather, attendance suffered and thus a retreat to the pub for an informal conversation amongst a small dedicated group of cinephiles seemed more appropriate than delivering a formal presentation. But I thought it might be worth posting my remarks here.

What RIP: A Remix Manifesto does extremely well is show what becomes possible when changes in technology and accessibility are harnessed by human creativity to catalyse a shift from what Lawrence Lessig has called a ‘read only’ culture--where one is limited in the ways in which they can engage with artefacts--to a ‘read/write’ culture where the ways that we interact with our cultural worlds are bound primarily by the limits of our imagination.

And what the film also does extremely well is to point to the contemporary imbalance between property rights--for some property owners--on the one hand and creative expression, innovation, and common-sense on the other. If we operate on the basis that read/write cultures are something to be fostered because they stimulate innovation, development, and cultural vibrancy, Lawrence Lessig reminds us that this means embracing amateur creativity including placing limits of the reach of copyright regulation. The point is that creativity and innovation, forces that bring together elements of existing work in novel ways, requires leaving amateur creativity free from draconian forms of regulation that can stifle cultural expression and its social transmission. As the philosopher Henri Bergson argued, freedom itself is the ability to create the unforeseen, an ability that seems to me to be harnessed through our creative capacities.

Thus, at a time when one would think that creativity would be encouraged--after all, isn’t innovation the key to the knowledge economy?--it is actually being hemmed in by material constraints. These constraints are imposed by a legal regulatory system that has been designed to force a return to a read only culture of times past that probably only really ever existed in the imaginations of media company executives and Lars Ulrich from Metallica.  So despite the human capacity for ingenuity, the presence of myriad technologies that are able to harness this capacity in exciting new ways, and the potential for these to combine to create cultural products and artefacts with positive social potential, we instead have a system that produces:

• legions of copyright trolls who extort money from the unsuspecting public by threatening lawsuits based on allegations of minor infringements;
• terms and conditions for items that one purchases that exceed the length of some of Shakespeare’s greatest works;
• channels of distribution for cultural products that attempt to create artificial scarcity;
• byzantine and draconian limits on the freedom of cultural expression;
• copyright asset stripping and predatory speculation;
• the imposition of forms of intrusive surveillance and monitoring of the general public paid for with public money;
• the premise of guilty until proven innocent;
• and proprietary systems and digital rights management that limit choice and innovation by attempting to circumvent the research and development powers of the crowd that arise through modifications, home brewing, and hacking.

So the question for me then is how can we position the contemporary pathology historically? One place to start is by turning to the work of noted economic historian Karl Polanyi and his classic text The Great Transformation. Although first published in 1944, it provides excellent insight into the contemporary imbalance between markets and property rights on the one hand and society and the public interest on the other.

Polanyi argued that for most of human history, markets--those places where distribution and exchange took place literally and figuratively--were embedded into societies. In part, this meant that they were a means to dispose of surplus and regulated in ways--sometimes formally, sometimes through cultural custom--such that their most potentially deleterious effects could be mitigated. But beginning with the rise of capitalism in Europe, he argued markets began to be understood as self-regulating entities. The policy prescription therefore was to treat markets as a separate entity apart from both society and from politics (i.e., markets had their own technical logics and natural tendencies that one must adhere to or suffer the consequences).  This change in governing logic meant that satisfying markets, not society, became a primary focus for government. Yet, so-called ‘free markets’ require inordinate amounts of legislation, rules, and laws in order to ‘self-regulate’.

So the dis-embedding of markets necessary for capitalism wasn’t a project that could arise spontaneously.  It required a strong state to intervene in order to impose market logics onto societies that regulated themselves through a different form of moral economy. Moreover, the state was needed in order to enforce new property regimes. Paradoxically, the initial success of this project turned into its biggest failure. As Polanyi documents, the effects of the transformationto market dominated socieities were so socially corrosive that the state and other institutions had to intervene almost immediately to mitigate the devastation that ensued. He referred to this oscillation as the double movement.

Unfortunately, over the past four decades, most societies have completely forgotten the lessons outlined in the Great Transformation about the importance of protecting social and cultural institutions in the wake of markets. While one might want to argue that markets have produced historically high levels of wealth overall, the intellectual property rights underpinning copyright and the forms of lawfare associated with them have become a way of embedding the material privileges of the wealthy (e.g., large media conglomerates, big pharma, big tech, big food), sustaining business models that would otherwise be unviable, and encouraging unproductive forms of rentierism as opposed to innovation and development.  And as we are experiencing first hand, this comes with significant social and cultural costs that are borne by the general public, much like those Polanyi documented in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

On a final note, the next time you hear a media company stooge, vacuous politician, or Lars from Metallica harping on about the negative consequences of file-sharing, limited copyright provisions, remixing, sharing , hacking, home-brewing, or making, look at how their arguments are structured. The appeal is always through notions of private property, revenue losses, the need for economic incentivization, and spurious analogies--for example, that file sharing is like stealing from a shop--that reinforce the idea that culture should be subordinate to market logics. It then follows that if culture refuses to be subordinate, the state must implement, by any means necessary, measures to ensure that specific market principles (i.e., property rights) dominate. They never present arguments that show the cultural or social benefits of constraining amateur creativity or forms of innovation that arise by limiting the collective ingenuity that can develop through crowd sourcing. This is because they don’t have any. Moreover, the idea that someone might design, code, tinker, write, or rock out because they see creative expression as a fundamental part of the human condition to be experienced, enjoyed, and SHARED regardless of the potential market benefits that might accrue by artificially creating scarcity is completely alien to them. Thus, the problem is more broadly based than the particulars of copyfight itself. It requires finding the means and measures of catalysing the social protections against the marketization of everyday life that are so desperately needed.

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 161

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'The Scam that Wall Street Learned from the Mafia' by Matt Taibbi at rollingstone.com

• 'Breadline Britain' at guardian.co.uk

• 'Various Forms of Lithic Disguise' by Geoff Manaugh at bldblog

• '...It's Better to Burn Out than to Fade Away--Has Higher Education Reached a Punk Moment?' by Peter Bryant at peterbryant

• 'How I Accidentally Kickstarted the Domestic Drone Boom' by Chris Anderson at dangerroom

Enjoy the weekend.

Photo Credit: Graeme Maclean