Exploring the potential of the popular culture and world politics agenda: actors, artefacts and the everyday

Abstract

The PCWP agenda has contributed a great deal to the discipline of world politics, empirically, methodologically and theoretically. However, there is scope to expand upon certain aspects of this body of scholarship. In particular, the agenda is developing some unfortunate hierarchies in its focus on high-budget 'blockbusters' at the expense of data from the everyday. It is displaying a lack of imagination in terms of its methodologies and forms of output, despite the aesthetic and creative nature of many of the artefacts. Finally, it is evincing a reluctance to explore representations beyond the textual or the visual, at the expense of other forms of representation, including sound, taste or, as I argue in this paper, artefactuality.