Jason Dittmer

Geopolitical assemblages and complexity

This article proposes a framework for considering materiality in the field of geopolitics: assemblage and complexity theories. Drawing on literatures beyond the field to imagine a posthuman geopolitics, this article argues for a relational ontology that emphasizes the complex interactions among the elements of an assemblage. These interactions produce emergent effects which themselves reshape the assemblage’s elements. This has implications for understandings of agency, subjectivity, and systemic change. The article concludes by highlighting the methodological and ethical challenges that such a project would face.

Popular Geopolitics Past and Future: Fandom, Identities and Audiences

This short and hopefully provocative paper serves as both a retrospective of the past twenty years of critical work on so-called popular geopolitics and also an impetus for a more theoretical connection to related areas within cultural studies, such as fan studies. An overarching theme of the history of popular geopolitics has been a concern over geopolitical representation and discourse, which is only now beginning to shift towards audience interpretation, consumption and attachment. This shift in focus parallels a similar move in cultural studies made several years prior. Therefore, this paper advocates combining theories from cultural studies with empirical studies of concern to popular geopolitics to further our understanding. Specifically outlined as a possibility in this paper is the viewing of nationalism and religion as forms of fan-based identities, in that both can be understood as adherence to serial narratives. This perspective carries several corollaries regarding methodology and object of study, most notably a concern with the making of geopolitical meaning by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts.

The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia ☆

Description: Over the past 15 years, Bosnia and Herzegovina has served as a laboratory of techniques to re–establish state sovereignty and promote democracy. The post–conflict intervention in Bosnia has justifiably received great interest from political theorists and scholars of international relations who have explored the limitations of the institutions and policies of international intervention. This book begins from an alternative premise: rather than examining institutions or charting limitations, Jeffrey argues for a focus on the performance of state sovereignty in Bosnia as it has been practiced by a range of actors both within and beyond the Bosnian state. In focusing on the state as a process, he argues that Bosnian sovereignty is best understood as a series of improvisations that have attempted to produce and reproduce a stable and unified state. Based on four periods of residential fieldwork in Bosnia, The Improvised State advances state theory through an illumination of the fragile and contingent nature of sovereignty in contemporary Bosnia and its grounding in the everyday lives of the Bosnian citizen.

Mapping the political geographies of Europeanization: National discourses, external perceptions and the question of popular culture

Political geographers have significantly contributed to understandings of the spatialities of Europeanization. We review some of this work, while also highlighting research themes where further political-geographic research would be insightful. We note the importance of work that captures both the diverse expressions and meanings attributed to Europe, European integration and ‘European power’ in different places within and beyond the EU, and the variegated manifestations of ‘Europeanizing’ processes across these different spaces. We also suggest that political-geographic research can add crucial input to reconceptualizing European integration as well as Europeanization as it now unfolds in a time of ‘crisis’.

The museum as assemblage: bringing forth affect at the Australian War Memorial

This article takes as its focus the Australian War Memorial, including its collections, the physical infrastructure of the site, its staff and the range of people who encounter it as tourists, researchers or military personnel and their families. In taking up this interest, our intention is not to diminish, ignore or bypass the role of narrative and representation in their spaces. Rather, we aim to contribute to a more-than-representational appreciation of museums. This sort of approach redirects attention to a range of elements including lighting, sound and movement. These are typically seen as ‘background noise’ but in reality do greatly productive work in terms of engineering atmospheres and subject positions for those within its spaces. This article interrogates the way in which these elements are utilized in four areas of the museum, all of which are explored through ethnographic reflections referencing ideas of more-than-human agency, affect and the haunting virtual.

Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, Second Edition

Gillian Roses second edition of Visual Methodologies is a smooth update of her original edition, first published in 2001. This new edition, like the first, systematizes an often rambling literatur...

The Geopolitical Audience: Watching Quantum of Solace (2008) in London

This article argues for the intersection of popular geopolitics and audience studies in audience power. This is demonstrated through a survey of viewers attending the James Bond film Quantum of Solace (QoS) at three theatres in the greater London area. Geography emerged as relevant to audiences in three forms. First, geography was understood as a catalyst for resource-based wars, providing an opportunity to reflect on these conflicts and their future likelihood. Second, geography serves as a difference engine for producing tension and excitement. Finally, geography emerged through the situatedness of viewing and rhizomatic nature of subjectivity. However, these geographies must be understood as part of a larger geopolitical assemblage that is animated by audience power. In conclusion, we argue for an understanding of geopolitical space as constituted through audiences’ constituent power to produce topologies. While audiences did not transform QoS into a radical text, this potential remains latent.

Captain Canuck, audience response, and the project of Canadian nationalism

This paper addresses the role of comic books in interpellating national identities, locating the process of national identity formation in the interplay between popular culture producers and their audiences as described by Althusser (1977) and McGee (1975). The empirical section of this paper focuses on Captain Canuck, a Canadian-produced comic book originating in the 1970s and sporadically published through the present day. The authors engaged in a qualitative content analysis of the Captain Canuck comic books, searching for themes and markers of Canadian-ness and looking for audience identifications with those themes and markers in the ‘letter to the editor’ columns published within the comic books themselves. The study finds that through the many incarnations of Captain Canuck various versions of Canadian identity have been projected, with varying degrees of support by the readership. The role of the USA in Canadian identity formation looms large, especially in the positioning of Canadian quality and multiculturalism against the tacitly American lack thereof. Another finding of this research is that there has been a fundamental change in the way Canadian identity is structured as a new, commercially driven Canadiana culture industry has arisen since the 1970s.

Immersive virtual worlds in university-level human geography courses

This paper addresses the potential for increased deployment of immersive virtual worlds in higher geographic education. An account of current practice regarding popular culture in the geography classroom is offered, focusing on the objectification of popular culture rather than its constitutive role vis-à-vis place. Current e-learning practice is similarly deemed insufficient, in particular its ability to promote social interaction among students. This paper argues that video games ought to be more thoroughly incorporated into the classroom experience so as to demolish the subject–object distinction between academic/popular knowledge and also to construct viable e-learning strategies. Adopting a constructivist perspective, video games are offered as a site for problem-based learning, noting that careful deployment for pedagogical purposes can harness the excitement and interest that many students already have for the medium. Within the genre, the educative potential of immersive virtual worlds such as Second Life is noted, particularly in regard to their radical openness, ease of social interaction and built-in student interest. Immersive virtual worlds are offered as particularly useful for promoting change within students’ conceptualizations of representation, narrativity and affect. A sample teaching strategy is offered for incorporation in the university classroom that can be adapted to many different geography courses.

Theorizing a More-than-Human Diplomacy: Assembling the British Foreign Office, 1839–1874

This article emphasizes the more-than-human nature of foreign policy formation and diplomatic practice, as found in an examination of nineteenth-century Parliament Select Committee testimony regarding the intersection of everyday bureaucratic practice and the material context of the British Foreign Office. These records indicate both how the changing world of diplomacy at this time (including new states and communication technologies) materially impacted the Foreign Office, as well as the affective atmosphere experienced by its employees, through an excess of paper. Debates over how the new Foreign Office ought to be built reveal concerns about the circulation of paper, bodies, light and air in a drive for efficiency. These historical materialities speak to our understanding of contemporary changes occurring within the world of diplomacy, including the rise of digital technologies and the new skills needed among diplomats, as well as inform our understanding of the exercise of power within assemblages.