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.
Edited
By Andreas Behnke
July 20, 2016
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 ...
By Alex Adams
June 23, 2016
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 ...
Edited
By Laura J. Shepherd, Caitlin Hamilton
June 02, 2016
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 ...
Edited
By Rens Van Munster, Casper Sylvest
May 31, 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 ...
By Anca Pusca
November 20, 2015
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, ...
By Penny Griffin
June 03, 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 ...
By Betty Kaklamanidou
February 27, 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...
By John Champagne
June 19, 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 ...
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 ...
By Laura J. Shepherd
August 27, 2012
This book examines the intersection of gender and violence in popular culture. Drawing on the latest thinking in critical international relations, media and cultural studies and gender studies, it focuses in particular on a number of popular TV shows including Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ...