Chasing Dragons

Battlestar Galactica and International Relations: Now Edward James Olmos Approved

Recently, a new installment in the Popular Culture and World Politics book series was released: Battlestar Galactica and International Relations, edited by Nick Kiersey and Iver B. Neumann. And now, we are proud to say that it is Edward James Olmos--aka Admiral Adama from the series--approved!

Apparently, upon hearing of the volume, EJO contacted Nick over Twitter--see the exchange below.

 

 

 

So, copies are on their way to EJO and the producers of BSG. More importantly, when we saw that the preferred medium for EJO was electronic, we managed to convince Routledge to reduce the cost of the Kindle edition to £9.99, an 88% savings on the original price.

Props from EJO and less expensive academic e-titles? So say we all!

@chasing_dragons and #ISA2013

I will be attending the ISA Annual Convention beginning on Wednesday in San Francisco. It is going to be a busy conference for me. I've agreed to do a fair amount. Moreover, unlike previous years where the old Springsteen song about '57 channels and nothing on' seemed far too appropriate, a quick scan of the programme reveals that there is a lot of really interesting stuff going on this year.

My conference starts off bright and early on Wednesday morning (8:15 in Yosemite C) where I will be serving as the discussant for a panel called 'Through Both Ends of the Lens: Imagery and the Everyday Diffusion of the International'. 

At 10.30am in Golden Gate 1, I will be presenting a paper called '"We can have eyes 24/7 on our adversaries": Remote Piloted Air Systems, Scopic Regimes, and the Aesthetic Subjects of Targeted Killing". This paper is a part of the panel on 'The New Materialisms of Affect' (sponsored by the British International Studies Association's Poststructural Working Group).

I then can take a mental break--which will probably include a disco nap--until 6.30pm when I am a participant on the 'Presidential Theme Roundtable—Film and Transnational Diffusion I: Moving Images, Emotions, Materialisms' in Continental 2. This will include a screening of the film Snijeg (Snow) directed by Aida Begić. Having a round-table on film included into the programme is a significant coup and full credit has to go to Aida Hozic for her efforts in expanding the ISA's horizons.

My next two days will be spent attending panels with a break to watch the Oakland Athletics matinee against the Seattle Mariners. I then have the good luck of being on a cracking panel called 'World Politics and Diffusion: The Case of Popular Culture'.  The fly in the ointment is that it has been scheduled for the last possible time-slot of the conference: 4.00pm on Saturday in Golden Gate 3. My co-panelists--Nick Robinson, Michael Shapiro, Marianne Franklin, Aggie Hirst, John Sweeney and James Der Derian--are all fantastic and well worth sticking around for. And I will be dragging up the rear, presenting a paper whose latest title is 'Encounters Through the Cooking Glass: Geopolitics and Aesthetic Subjects in Breaking Bad'. 

If you see me out and about at #ISA2013 do say 'hello'. I am also happy to meet to talk about papers, special sections, or special issue proposals for Politics and Critical Studies on Security as well as book projects for the Popular Culture and World Politics series. Please speak to me in San Francisco or get in touch with me via my institutional email address.

Photo credit: laverrue

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. 171

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'The Coming Civil War Over General Purpose Computing' by Cory Doctorow at boingboing.net

• 'The Modern US Army: Unfit for Service?' by Matt Kennard at guardian.co.uk

• 'Study: We Benefit From Seeing Strong Women on TV' by Lindsay Abrams at theatlantic.com

• 'Impossible Choices? The Conservatism of Breaking Bad' by Michael Corcoran at truth-out.org

Have a good weekend.

Photo credit: Viernest

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 155

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Real Innovation: What It Really Is, and How to Do It (Really)' by Bill O'Connor at forbes.com

• 'Are the LOLCats Making Us Smart' by Rebecca J. Rosen at theatlantic.com

• In anticipation of the airing of '56 Up' this week, the entire '7 Up' Documentary Series at youtube.com

• 'Now 4 Billion People Know the Joy of Txt' by John Naughton at guardian.co.uk

• 'Pentagon Issues Drone War Talking Points' by Spencer Ackerman at thedangerroom

• 'Israeli Spy Flick Reimagines Dubai Killing' by Tia Goldenbery at foxnews.com

• 'Drone Pilots: We Don't Get No Respect' by Mark Thompson at battleland (three doses of 'oh dear' in a row)

Happy Mother's Day and enjoy the weekend!

Photo credit: amyelyse

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 145

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Oh London, You Drama Queen' by China Mieville at nytimes.com

• 'It Wos the Sun Wot Couldn't Do Maths: Prioritising Benefit Fraud When Tax Fraud is 10X Worse' at leftfootforward.org (Murdoch and Co. make another contribution to the Tory class war)

• 'Academics, Brace Yourselves' by Thomas Rid at kingsofwar.org

• 'Wall Street Bonus Withdrawl Means Trading Aspen for Coupons' by Max Abelson at bloomberg.com

• 'The Walking Dead: Still Awfully Misogynist' at globalsociology.com

• 'Presence of Mind' by Michael Wood at lrb.co.uk

• 'Cleaning Up the 'Hood' at economist.com (discusses the shift in counter-narcotics to 'drug markets')

Peace.

Photo credit: www.belsayimages.com (Yvette Mattern's Global Rainbow over Spanish City in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, UK)

Popular Culture and World Politics v. 5.0

Popular Culture and World Politics v. 5.0

9-11 November, 2012

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Geneva, New York, 14456, USA

What do zombies have to do with world politics? How might the Twilight sagas inform and illuminate our way of understanding world politics and changes in the global political economy? In what ways do videogames, the sales of which now exceed those of music CDs and DVDS combined, shape the identities and political understandings of frequent players? Is visual media destined to replace print as the primary source of news and entertainment in advanced industrial societies and how might this affect the construction of meaning of world affairs? As a means of communication readily available to an ever-expanding number of individuals and groups, how might the internet offer paths of resistance to corporate and Western news and entertainment hegemony? How can tango dancing make the world a more peaceful place?

This conference explores the multiple ways of investigating the intersections of world politics and the production, circulation, content, and consumption of various popular cultural forms. Engaging a range of disciplines and practices in the social sciences, humanities and the arts, the conference encourages participants to question what terms such as ‘global,’ ‘popular,’ and ‘culture’ mean both in isolation and when used in conjunction. It asks in what ways and with what effects popular culture has become a series of sites at which political meaning is made, where political contestation takes place, and where political orthodoxy is reproduced and challenged. The conference provides a highly-focused and interdisciplinary environment in which the increasing numbers of scholars that are engaging in culture-related research can present their work and participate in the kind of extended discussion that larger conferences do not permit. The conference aims to provide an intimate forum at which debates about interdisciplinary methods and theoretical approaches can be developed to facilitate debate across disciplines that share interests in world politics and culture. We welcome proposals for performances, screenings, panels, or individual papers, on any aspect of world politics and popular culture.

Building on the preceding four PCWP conferences, version 5.0 will be held on the campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, a small liberal arts institution located in the beautiful Finger Lakes (wine-making) region of western New York state.

Inquiries should be sent to PCWP@hws.edu
The deadline for proposals is 15 July 2012

Many thanks to Kevin Dunn who has graciously agreed to host and organize this year's event!

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 137

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising' by the Directorate for Employment, Labour, and Social Affairs at oecd.org

• 'How Companies Avoid Tax--A Quick Summary in 8,000 Words'  by Richard Murphy at www.taxresearch.org

• 'Behind the Rise of the Great Powers' by Liu Xiaobo (translated by Josephine Chiu-Duke) at guernicamag.com

• 'Vestige(s) of Empire' by James Biber at designobserver.com

• 'Do "Prestigious" Journals Make Academics Lazy? An Unlikely Parallel with the Art World' by Mark Carrigan at markcarrigan.net

• 'Universities Gone Wild: Big Money, Big Sports, and Scandalous Abuse at Penn State' by  Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux at truth-out.org

Have a good weekend.

Photo credit: Abhi Shinde