Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Matt DaviesORCiD
Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.
Popular culture covers a wide range of cultural products, practices, and industries, embraced by the public, immersed in everyday life, and both structuring of and structured by politics. Despite the ubiquity of pop-culture objects and their obvious and frequent use for political purposes, the discipline of International Relations (IR) had long remained aloof to its potential to illuminate world politics. But in the 21st century, studies of popular culture as a site for politics have proliferated in IR. With some important exceptions, most of this work, in both critical and pedagogical genres, initially looked for representations of themes, problems, or actors in popular culture texts— warfare in video games or diplomacy in Star Trek, for example, or genres as exemplifying concepts from IR. Both theoretically and in terms of subject matters, the scholarship of popular culture has since significantly expanded, uncovering the potential of popular culture to illuminate and even alter prevailing power relations. And yet, despite these new openings and a much wider range of engagements with popular culture, including its production as a mode of IR scholarship, certain limitations—indicative of the discipline’s own persistent bounds—remain. While the abundance and accessibility of cultural products in global circulation—from K-pop to Turkish soap operas and from memes to artificial intelligence–generated art—may not have been greater, the shape and political orientation of the communities that they will create are yet to be determined.
Author(s): Hozić A, Davies M
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies
Year: 2024
Pages: 1-20
Online publication date: 17/07/2024
Acceptance date: 19/07/2024
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Place Published: Oxford
URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.814
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.814
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9780190846626