Popular Culture and World Politics

Series Editor(s): Simon Philpott, Newcastle University

Popular culture has been an important area of research throughout the era of mass media and mass audiences. It has been a constitutive element of mass polities over the last century and, in turn, such polities have had significant effects on mass media-mediated content—and corporate and technological forms—of popular culture. Politicians, academics, and other actors in world politics do not live in a cultural vacuum.

The Popular Culture and World Politics (PCWP) series will focus on this growing field of popular culture and world politics. Necessarily, the series will have as its central assumption and argument that contemporary popular culture (including but not limited to cinema, television, the blogosphere, electronic games, the internet and online communities and resources) is a key site at which international political life is produced and contested. The series will interrogate progressive narratives that characterize much contemporary debate on the liberating and democratizing effects of the spread of new media technologies and cultures in the context of popular culture in western democratic and transitional societies. New media, such as video games, are also sites in which the subject-positions of (e.g.) race, gender, class, and ethnicity, and a range of moral and political values are contested and inscribed with new meaning, with no guarantees these will be "progressive" processes or outcomes. Nonetheless, the series will take issue with the concept of western cultural imperialism and propose that in this age such theoretical approaches are no longer tenable.

Recognizing the highly complex nature of contemporary popular culture, the series will encourage interdisciplinary scholarship and submissions from a range of scholarly and academic backgrounds.



Other editors:

Matt Davies, Newcastle University; Kyle Grayson, Newcastle University; Christina Rowley, Bristol University; and Jutta Weldes, Bristol University