Matt Davies

Pop Goes IR? Researching the Popular Culture–World Politics Continuum

In this article we offer a potential research agenda for the study of popular culture in IR and outline how this research agenda could be advanced. If the incorporation of popular culture into IR is going to be fruitful, there must be a willingness to go beyond an engagement with illustrations of world politics. Doing so will get us closer to what is at stake in the mutual implication of popular culture and world politics.

Everyday Life in the Global Political Economy

Calls to ground the study of international relations in everyday life have found increasing salience among critical approaches to the field. Feminists, poststructuralists and historical materialists have all sought to address problems in international relations theory by breaking down conceptual divisions between the domestic and international, between the local and the global, or between the private and the public. Everyday life is not a new concern among sociologists or philosophers and a variety of approaches to it, ranging from positivist descriptions of daily routines to speculative accounts of the lifeworld, have been posited and explored in these disciplines. However, for International Relations (IR), and particularly for International Political Economy (IPE), everyday life remains largely under-or untheorized, with damaging consequences for the concept’s contribution to critique.

International political economy and mass communication in Chile

International political economy and mass communication in Chile , International political economy and mass communication in Chile , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

The Public Spheres of Unprotected Workers

This article examines emergent forms of political subjectivity amongst subordinate social forces, focusing on how ‘unprotected’ workers in household relations of production can become political subjects antagonistic to world order. For unprotected workers the very lack of institutional protection makes articulating political demands risky. At the same time, the need to conceptualise the manner in which the workers in the households and in proximate forms of social relations of production become political subjects is increasingly urgent. The article begins by articulating a conception of the public sphere relevant to the forms of political subjectivity examined. The argument then proceeds to situate the family in the global political economy. Next, the article examines the circulation of women between the household and proximate forms of social relations of production. It is in this circulation that unprotected workers produce potential and emergent counter-public spheres needed for the forms of political subjectivity that challenge the dominant forces in world order.

The Aesthetics of the Financial Crisis Work, Culture, and Politics

The ways that financialization has contributed to the technocratic and antipolitical management of economies have become ever more evident in the wake of the financial crisis that commenced in the autumn of 2007. This bracketing and suspension of politics occurs in various ways but significantly, it does so through the obscuring of work as a moment of economic life. If economics has been complicit in this antipolitics, can an aesthetic approach to financialization shed light on how work is rendered invisible? This article analyzes four short film clips all distributed through YouTube to show not only how their visual and narrative elements organize subjectivities for an antipolitics of finance but also to find in the popular aesthetic a different “distribution of the sensible” that permits moments of suspension or rupture that can politicize financialized subjectivity and begin to recover a politics of work.

Do It Yourself: Punk Rock and the Disalienation of International Relations

You can do this: find two or three friends who you can work with closely for a year. Go to a pawnshop or look in the want ads to buy a basic drum kit, one or two electric guitars, a bass guitar, and amplifiers. You will also need microphones and an inexpensive PA. You will need a place to practice, and it is best if everyone commits to practicing for a couple of hours two or three times a week. Listen to punk rock together, and pick out half a dozen songs that all of you are willing to play. Most punk songs are fairly simple, stripped down rock and roll: learn to play your instruments on these “cover” songs. Your goal for playing these songs is speed and precision. After a few weeks of learning your covers, you will find that each of you is learning to listen to each of the others, and you should be communicating with each other about what is going right and what is wrong—problems like speeding the tempo up or dragging, or missing chord changes while singing. As your communication develops and as you begin to get tired of playing the same few songs all the time, you should begin to experiment with the basic forms—rhythms, chord changes—that you have learned. These experiments will be your first efforts at song writing. You will need to write lyrics for punk songs. Your songs should be about things that make you angry and that ought to make others angry, but do not preach in your songs.

‘As if “relations” mattered’: a reply to Martin Weber

This is a reply to:Weber, Martin. 2014. “As if ‘relations’ mattered: how to subvert positional bias in social science with a lot of help from ‘others’….” Global Discourse. 4 (1): 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2013.805513

Review of Mira Schor, A decade of negative thinking: Essays on art, politics, and daily life

This volume presents selected papers delivered or arising from a 2007 conference, ‘Germany’s Colonialism in International Perspective’, circumscribing the relationship between German colonialism and postcolonialism and popular visual culture. In his introduction, editor Volker M. Langbehn discusses the ways in which German colonialism is being reconsidered in relation to race, nationalism and globalisation, and specifically the ways in which these aspects can be read through an analysis of visual representation appearing in popular visual culture: photographs, postcards, advertisements, posters and films examined in subsequent chapters.

Power, Production and World Order Revisited: Some Preliminary Conclusions

The end of the Cold War fundamentally reshaped international studies. The ceteris paribus assumptions, which had made the interstate conflict dimension the privileged object of analysis and neorealism the dominant paradigm of the field, could no longer be plausibly maintained. The unequivocal victory of the US and the West in the Second Cold War, under the increasingly market oriented and neoliberal leadership of the Reagan administration, generated a fair degree of triumphalism and optimism in liberal academic circles. Expressed most strikingly by Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) ‘end of history’ thesis, international politics was seen as increasingly devoid of conflict. In a world of ‘complex interdependence’ (Keohane and Nye, 1989), the realist games would be increasingly displaced by liberal games characterized by a rational, positive-sum politics of allocation, identity formation and cosmopolitan democracy.