More information about the genesis of this panel here. Paper abstracts here. Hope to see you February 18 in the Grand Salon 3 at the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans at 4:00!
Friday Nerd Blogging: Winter is Coming to #ISA2015
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popular culture
Beyond Robopocalypticism
In all the media frenzy over “killer robots,” Terminator imagery comes up a lot. So do references to Battlestar Galactica. So does a specific scene from Robocop, soon to be remade to resonate with...
Common Errors in Essay Writing, as Demonstrated by Film Critics, Part 1
Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post settled on a theme for her extremely negative review of the new "The Lone Ranger" flick. Indeed, one might argue that developing a unifying thread is an important...
New Podcast: Interview with Patrick James
Well, sort of. I've been getting a surprising number of emails asking for new podcasts. This semester was a killer, and no one else on the team wants to spearhead the effort. I hope to do some more...
More popular culture Posts
Academic Rigor in the Classroom: Time to Get Serious?
Charli, Dan and Patrick at ISA 2013? The academics/educators who write this blog often locate their research and teaching interests in texts from popular culture. Dan has co-edited a book on Harry Potter and IR. Patrick teaches a course on science fiction and social science. Dan offers a course on science fiction and politics. Charli blogs frequently about science fiction and has a working paper on "Security or Human Security? Civil-Military Relations in Battlestar Galactica." I've frequently taught a class on "Global Politics Through Film" and am working on a project about "the comedy of...
Pop Culture Narratives in World Politics: A Bleg
I will be on a panel at 1.45pm in Indigo A with the following description:There has been a growing body of work in world politics that relies on or analyzes fictional narratives. To what extent can cultutal phenomena like Battlestar Galactica or Harry Potter be used as for pedagogical purposes in the classroom? How useful are such narratives as data points to either explicate or substantiate theoretical claims in world politics? This roundtable weighs the costs and benefits of using popular culture narratives inside the classroom and in publications.Charli Carpenter will be discussing her...
Friday Nerd Blogging
Just in time for Game of Thrones' Season 2 (which happens inconveniently right in the middle of ISA), Foreign Affairs has posted this constructivist riposte to the foreign policy commentariat's realism-worship-fest from last Season (warning: contains Season 1 spoilers):Commentary by foreign policy analysts on the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones stressed its supposed underlying theme of political realism. Thus one writer claimed that the TV show and the George R.R. Martin novels on which it is based "clearly demonstrate the power of might over right," and another agreed: "In this kind...
BREAKING NEWS: Brian Ratbun Exposed As Secret Mastermind Behind Recent Rockumentary; USC Concerned About Contract Violation, Mental Health
THE CANARD"All the fake news that's fit to print."-- Los Angeles*A political science professor at University of Southern California came under fire this week for the role he may have played behind-the-scenes on a recent documentary about the heavy metal band Metallica. Administrators at the university are investigating whether Professor Brian Christopher Rathbun’s participation in the project may have violated rules permitting faculty to consult no more than one day a week on projects outside the university. The film in question, Some Kind of Monster, is described by Rotten Tomatoes as “a...
Friday Nerd Blogging
Last week I posted the trailer. Yesterday, Volkswagen released its much awaited sequel to its "Vader Kid" Super Bowl Commercial from last year. The original: Which do readers think is funnier? Personally I think the "The Bark Side" wins. NPR considers what this ad strategy tells us about the future of marketing.
Robots and Prejudice
At ThinkProgress Alyssa Rosenberg shares a lovely new short film about robots and prejudice:No Robots from YungHan Chang on Vimeo.Rosenberg draws a distinction between the representations of robots in this film and the scarier representations in much popular culture:Often, when we see robots in popular culture, they’re actually more powerful than we are. If the Cylons were a metaphor for, say, Irish immigrants to the United States, they’d be telling a story about workers rising up from the slums and engulfing us all in whiskey and potatoes. These metaphors tend to legitimate the fears of...
Hu’s Culture War
Building on PM's earlier post, "Cultural Weapons and International Relations" I'd like to look at an example that helps to illustrate the ways in which Realism misunderstands the role of culture in global politics. In his blog post titled, "China's War Against Harry Potter," Stephen Walt analyzes President Hu Jintao's attempt to defend Chinese culture by increasing its production of local culture. What is interesting is that Walt has plenty to say about culture, but he wants to separate cultural production from the state and to portray the state's attempt to manage culture as...
Popular Culture and Politics: Russian Perceptions of the Near Abroad
RFE/RL carries an interview with Susan Layton on her book, Russian Literature and the Empire. A sample:Russian national consciousness began developing in the 18th century, on contact with foreign non-national entities. From the time of Peter the Great, Western Europe played the central role as a clarifier of "Russian-ness." But the Asian borderlands of the Russian Empire also contributed to this formation of Russian national, as well as imperial consciousness. As of the 18th century, ethnographic expeditions to the Caucasus, Crimea, Siberia, and so on produced huge compilations of data that...