Popular Culture and World Politics
About the Book Series
The Popular Culture World Politics (PCWP) book series is the forum for leading interdisciplinary research that explores the profound and diverse interconnections between popular culture and world politics. It aims to bring further innovation, rigor, and recognition to this emerging sub-field of international relations.
To these ends, the PCWP series is interested in various themes, from the juxtaposition of cultural artefacts that are increasingly global in scope and regional, local and domestic forms of production, distribution and consumption; to the confrontations between cultural life and global political, social, and economic forces; to the new or emergent forms of politics that result from the rescaling or internationalization of popular culture.
Similarly, the PCWP series wishes to provide a venue for work that explores the effects of new technologies and new media on established practices of representation and the making of political meaning. It encourages engagement with popular culture as a means for contesting powerful narratives of particular events and political settlements as well as explorations of the ways that popular culture informs mainstream political discourse. The PCWP series promotes investigation into how popular culture contributes to changing perceptions of time, space, scale, identity, and participation while establishing the outer limits of what is popularly understood as ‘political’ or ‘cultural’.
In addition to film, television, literature, and art, the PCWP series actively encourages research into diverse artefacts including sound, music, food cultures, gaming, design, architecture, programming, leisure, sport, fandom and celebrity. The series is fiercely pluralist in its approaches to the study of popular culture and world politics and is interested in the past, present, and future cultural dimensions of hegemony, resistance and power.
German Wartime Memory, American Exceptionalism, and Post-Cold War Blockbuster Cinema
1st Edition
By Robert Pirro
August 29, 2025
This book excavates the diverse and mostly unnoticed political meanings made available to American and German audiences by the blockbuster films helmed by transplanted West German directors Roland Emmerich and Wolfgang Petersen. Through formal film analysis, broad consideration of American and ...
The World Politics of Disco Elysium
1st Edition
Edited
By Vic Castro, Nicholas Kiersey
June 30, 2025
The World Politics of Disco Elysium analyzes the distinctive political claims and original arguments on a wide range of international political issues of the highly-acclaimed Marxist video game Disco Elysium (2019), which takes place in a speculative fictional world anchored in a post-Soviet ...
Popular Culture, Social Media, and the Politics of Identity
1st Edition
By William Clapton
November 08, 2024
Popular Culture, Social Media, and the Politics of Identity advances a novel methodological approach – pop culture as political object – to capture the centrality of popular culture as an object of a broad range of political contests and debates that constitute pop culture artefacts by generating ...
The Art of Populism in US Politics: Pro-Trump DIY Popular Culture
1st Edition
By Justin Patch
August 26, 2024
The Art of Populism in US Politics investigates connections between populist politics and artistic expressions in the United States in the Trump era. Beginning with comparisons between frontier populism and millennial-era populism, the author examines how citizens imitate and improvise on political...
Brexit and the Migrant Voice: EU Citizens in post-Brexit Literature and Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Christine Berberich
May 27, 2024
Brexit and the Migrant Voice provides a platform for the perspectives of European citizens and migrants living and working in the UK by assessing their representation in British and European cultural productions (literature, drama, the media) and by foregrounding their attitudes, their fears, and ...
Politicised Cinema: Post-War Film, Cultural Diplomacy and UNESCO
1st Edition
By Miia Huttunen
September 25, 2023
Politicised Cinema demonstrates how taking a collection of seemingly apolitical films and using them as an instrument for serving explicit political aims can be used as a force for good. Through an analysis of Orient: A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture, a film ...
Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir: What Television Series Tell Us About World Politics
1st Edition
By Robert A. Saunders
August 01, 2022
With its focus on the popular television genre of Nordic noir, this book examines subtle and explicit manifestations of geopolitics in crime series from Scandinavia and Finland, as well as the impact of such programmes on how northern Europe is viewed around the world. Drawing on a diverse set of ...
Nationalism and Popular Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Tim Nieguth
September 30, 2021
How do nations come to shape our collective imagination so profoundly? This book argues that the power of national identity and national belonging stems, in part, from the ways in which nationalism is embedded in popular culture.Comprised of chapters covering a wide range of cases from both the ...
The Art of Global Power: Artwork and Popular Cultures as World-Making Practices
1st Edition
Edited
By Emily Merson
September 30, 2021
Artwork and popular cultures are crucial sites of contesting and transforming power relationships in world politics. The contributors to this edited collection draw on their experiences across arts, activist, and academic communities to analyze how the global politics of colonialism, capitalism, ...
The Political Economy of Celebrity Activism
1st Edition
Edited
By Nathan Farrell
March 31, 2021
This edited collection brings together scholarly works of both a theoretical and empirical nature to critically analyse the forms and functions of the contemporary celebrity activist and to examine how these intersect with the political economic structures in which celebrity activists operate. ...
Post-Communist Aesthetics: Revolutions, capitalism, violence
1st Edition
By Anca Pusca
August 14, 2020
In this book, Anca Pusca seeks to extend the aesthetic and cultural turn in international relations to an analysis of post-communist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe. Building on the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Ranciere, the work investigates how post-communist film, ...
Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought: Narratives of World Politics
1st Edition
By Adam Stock
June 30, 2020
Over the past few years, ‘dystopia’ has become a word with increasing cultural currency. This volume argues that we live in dystopian times, and more specifically that a genre of fiction called "dystopia" has, above others, achieved symbolic cultural value in representing fears and anxieties about ...