Description
Popular culture is often used in dismissed as trivial and not worthy of serious engagement by scholars of IR. This panel challenges such thinking demonstrating that popular culture offers a set of insights to challenge what we often come to see as common sense, to problematise our methods and understandings, to legitimate the importance of producers as legitimate political operators, to widen our appreciation of aesthetic sensibilities, to enable us to think anew about activism and empowerment, and to demonstrate their centrality of social media and popular culture to affect change. These papers offer insight to methods and methodology, open up important insights in relation to empirical findings, and collectively provide a powerful rejoinder to those who suggest that pop culture is not important – in fact, as this panel goes to show, we can say little about world politics if we are not attuned to the centrality of popular culture.
