Chasing Dragons

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 194

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'A Historical Primer on the Business of Credit Ratings' by Richard Sylla at worldbank.org

• 'Smacks and the City' by Dan Whitehead at gameological.com (on the semiotics of the classic arcade game Double Dragon)

• 'The Latin Amercian Exception: How a Washington Global Tortue Gulag was Turned into the Only Gulag-Free Zone on Earth' by Greg Grandin at guernicamag.com

• 'Send in the Clowns: Celebrities Take Over Indonesian Politics' by Pitan Daslani at thejakartaglobe.com

• 'Drone Pilots are Found to Get Stress Disorders as Much as Those in Combat Do' by Jame Dao at nytimes.com

Photo credit: Lali Masriera

Stay safe.

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. 189

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'How Obama Decides Your Fate If He Thinks You're a Terrorist' by Daniel Byman and Benjamin Wittes at theatlantic.com

• 'What *Should* We Be Worried About in 2013' at edge.org

• 'Politics Editorial: The Changing Landscape of Academic Publishing' by Martin Coward and Kyle Grayson from Politics

• 'A Helpful Reminder: Video Game Consumption is Not Correlated to Gun Violence' by Maggie Koerth-Baker at boingboing.net

Enjoyt the weekend!

Image credit: Tommaso Meli

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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

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. 132

This weekend in the reading roudup:

• 'What Does Yesterday's News Mean for Living Standards?' by Robert Joyce at ifs.org (perhaps better titled, 'This is your economy on George Osborne')

• 'CSIS Head Urged Government to Fight Ban on Information Obtained Through Torture' by Catherine Solyom at montrealgazette.com

• 'Modern Warfare 3 and the Retreat From Precision' by Martin Coward at martincoward.net

• 'Artistic License to Kill: Does An AK-47 Belong in A Design Museum?' by Jonathan Jones at onartblog

• 'Hollywood Studios Accused of Pushing Liberal Agenda Through Children's Films' by Paul Bond at hollywoodreporter.com

Hang in there.

Happy Belated Anniversary to Chasing Dragons & Apocalyptic Blasts from the Past

I'm pleased to announce the 2nd year anniversary of the chasingdragons blog. Okay, so it technically took place last week but I'm going to operate under a 'better late than never' policy. 

I've written 320 posts since May 2009 and have welcomed somewhere in the neighbourhood of 15,000 unique readers from 132 different countries over that time. A big thank you to everyone who has read, linked, tweeted, facebooked, subscribed, or commented on content posted here. It's greatly appreciated!

But enough with the shameless self-promotion. Given all the talk that the end is nigh--read deranged proclamations from a weirdo who has been wrong before--I thought I would go into the cellar and bring out four old posts that are relevant:

• Visualizing Nuclear Armageddon

• Is this What a Global Pandemic Would Look Like?

• Is this What a Global Pandemic Would Look Like? v. 2

• Forecasting the Apocalypse? Think Zizek

Umm, enjoy them while you can?

Photo credit: Sasha Wolff

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

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 98

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Converting the Virtual Economy into Development Potential: Knowledge Map of the Digital Economy' by Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta & Dr. Mirko Ernkvist at infodev.org

• 'The Politics of the Event' by William E. Connolly at thecontemporarycondition

• 'How a Symbol of Hope was Murdered' by Conal Urquhart at guardian.co.uk

• 'Urban Hypotheticals' by Geoff Manaugh at bldblog

• 'What Baseball's Hall of Fame and a Communist Museum have in Common' by Mark Lamster at designobserver.com

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Photo credit: oedipusphinx----theJWDBan

Getting the Message Across: Anti-Mubarak Posters and Global Communication

Last week, the Guardian had an excellent photo feature on Egyptian protest signs. And as the protests continue, there has been no shortage of images in the media of some truly excellent, pithy, and poignant protest placards.

Most of the signs that feature in these images are written in English. This is certainly a function of  who is buying these photographs and who is their audience.

But what I find interesting is that protesters are choosing to communicate their frustrations, grievances, and demands in a way that opens the possibility for others around the world to directly understand them and express solidarity. Writing messages on signs in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi or other languages is something not common at protests in the Anglo-American world. Perhaps this reflects the privileges of having your own native tongue as the lingua franca?

But, something else is striking about many of the images we are shown of the Egyptian protest signs: the prominence of the iconography and idioms of cyber-culture.

Thus, as a means of expressing concerns with respect to human rights and democratization, are online platform names, twitter tags, and even video game tag lines the preferred common reference points for global communication?

And what is it about the products of cyber-culture that allows them to escape imperialist connotations in a way that other global reference points in popular culture (e.g., coca cola) cannot?

Image credits: Hannibal Hanschke/EPA, Asmaa Waguih/Reuters, Gilad Lotan, Anwar Amro/AFP, Ben Curtis/AP,unattributed,Ben Curtis/AP