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.
Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror: Sensible Interventions
1st Edition
By Jenifer Chao
December 12, 2019
Cultural Resistance, 9/11, and the War on Terror: Sensible Interventions offers a fresh account of the enduring cultural legacies of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the global war on terror through the critical lens of cultural resistance. It assesses the intersecting ways that ...
Political Torture in Popular Culture: The Role of Representations in the Post-9/11 Torture Debate
1st Edition
By Alex Adams
December 12, 2019
Political Torture in Popular Culture argues that the literary, filmic, and popular cultural representation of political torture has been one of the defining dimensions of the torture debate that has taken place in the course of the post-9/11 global war on terrorism. The book argues that cultural ...
The International Politics of Fashion: Being Fab in a Dangerous World
1st Edition
Edited
By Andreas Behnke
December 12, 2019
This book seeks to address and fill a puzzling omission in contemporary critical IR scholarship. Following on from the aesthetic turn in IR, critical and ‘postmodern’ IR has produced an impressive array of studies into movies, literature, music and art and the way these media produce, mediate, and ...
Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age
1st Edition
Edited
By Laura J. Shepherd, Caitlin Hamilton
December 12, 2019
The practices of world politics are now scrutinised in a way that is unprecedented, with even those previously – or conventionally assumed to be – disengaged from international affairs being drawn into world politics by social media. Interactive websites allow users to follow election results in ...
Imagining Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary World Fiction
1st Edition
By Michael Walonen
November 28, 2019
We are in the midst of the third tectonic social transformation in human history. Our current transition toward greater forms of transnational interconnection, consumption- and finance-driven rather than production-based capitalism, digital information and cultural flows, and the attendant ...
Sexing War/Policing Gender: Motherhood, myth and women’s political violence
1st Edition
By Linda Åhäll
October 26, 2017
Historically, there has been reluctance, from mainstream IR scholars as well as feminists, to seriously engage with women’s agency in warfare. Instead, scholarship has tended to focus on women’s activism for peace or to ignore women’s agency altogether. This book rectifies this omission by ...
The Politics of HBO’s The Wire: Everything is Connected
1st Edition
Edited
By Shirin Deylami, Jonathan Havercroft
December 02, 2016
This innovative new work suggests that The Wire reflects, not simply a cultural take on contemporary America, but a structural critique of the conditions of late-modernity and global capitalism. As such, it is a visual text worth investigating and exploring for its nuanced examination of power, ...
Documenting World Politics: A Critical Companion to IR and Non-Fiction Film
1st Edition
Edited
By Rens Van Munster, Casper Sylvest
June 01, 2016
As a central component of contemporary culture, films mirror and shape political debate. Reflecting on this development, scholars in the field of International Relations (IR) increasingly explore the intersection of TV series, fiction film and global politics. So far, however, virtually no ...
Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism: Why women are in refrigerators and other stories
1st Edition
By Penny Griffin
June 08, 2015
While some have argued that we live in a ‘postfeminist’ era that renders feminism irrelevant to people’s contemporary lives this book takes ‘feminism’, the source of eternal debate, contestation and ambivalence, and situates the term within the popular, cultural practices of everyday life. It ...
Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism: The New Millennium Hollywood Rom Com
1st Edition
By Betty Kaklamanidou
March 04, 2015
The romantic comedy has long been regarded as an inferior film genre by critics and scholars alike, accused of maintaining a strict narrative formula which is considered superficial and highly predictable. However, the genre has resisted the negative scholarly and critical comments and for the last...
Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy
1st Edition
By John Champagne
June 23, 2014
Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy is an interdisciplinary historical re-reading of a series of representative texts that complicate our current understanding of the portrayal of masculinity in the Italian fascist era. Examining paintings, films, music and literature in light of ...
Battlestar Galactica and International Relations
1st Edition
Edited
By Nicholas J. Kiersey, Iver B Neumann
May 30, 2014
Looking at a television franchise like Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is no longer news within the discipline of International Relations. A growing number of scholars in and out of IR are studying the importance of cultural artifacts – popular or otherwise – for the phenomena that make up the core of ...