Description
Popular culture and world politics continues to grow as a subfield in international relations. While initial concerns focused on pedagogy, representation and inter-textuality for the purposes of determining how popular culture might help us to understand power and the sites through which it circulates, more recent work has begun to explore the materiality of popular culture and how its embodiment may also contribute to global political dynamics. Yet inspite of the growth of research into this field, there still remain a number of scholars who challenge the validity of research on popular culture and world politics, caricaturing it as ‘frivolous’ and ‘not the stuff of real politics.’ This roundtable explicitly offers a rejoinder to such thinking to explicitly unpack how popular culture might matter, when it might matter, where it might matter, to whom it might matter, and how its myriad influences might be assessed and/or perceived. Considering the broader aesthetic turn within international relations, contributors will also examine how aesthetic approaches provide additional insights into popular culture and world politics. Also questions of method and methodologies, as well as engagement with core concepts shaping how we might understand the popular culture-world politics nexus, will be areas of debate.
