Symposium ‘exploring the (multiple) futures of world politics through popular culture’

ABSTRACT

Bringing popular culture and world politics together yields multiple advantages, including shifting where the ‘political’ is located and expanding conventional understandings of policy and policy communities. It matters that researchers expand what is considered necessary for understanding the socio-political world, that they challenge hierarchical assumptions of where world politics happens and that they reconsider what and whose knowledge counts. Taking popular culture seriously ‘creates new spaces for critical reflection’ (Federica Caso and Caitlin Hamilton [2015]. Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies. Bristol: E-International Relations, 2), spaces to which this Symposium contributes directly.     

‘The best thing ever’: how children's popular culture matters

This paper reflects upon a popular cultural event which was, briefly, for a particular grouping of children in the UK, ‘the best thing ever’: namely the release of the CD-single Reach, by the British pop group S Club 7. I suggest that this event was illustrative of manifold cultural forms and practices which—being ostensibly banal, fun, faddish, lowbrow and ‘childish’—continue to go largely unheralded by many social/cultural geographers. Against this grain, this paper presents three apprehensions of S Club 7’s significance. First, I restate a particular case made via Anglo-American cultural studies that ‘children's popular culture’, ought to be taken more seriously in contexts salient to social/cultural geographers. Second, I detail how the S Club 7 phenomenon existed, practically and materially, and mattered, in some children's everyday lives. Third, refracting cultural geographers' recent apprehensions of affective, evental aspects of cultural practices, I suggest that the pop cultural phenomenon described herein mattered (to those children, there and then) in ways which elude and exceed canonical scholarly habits of writing/knowing popular cultural phenomena.     

‘The dilemmas and paradoxes of public bodies performing commercial tasks’: The rhetoric of rationality and the rejection of traditional labor philosophy on the role of the state.

Traditionally a commitment to an active public sector has been a centrepiece of Labor's official thinking. Rhetorical conflict between Labor and non‐Labor has always focused upon the role of the State. The most recent instance of this was the debate between Labor and non‐Labor over the Fraser Government's Review of Commonwealth Functions (commonly known as the ‘Razor Gang').

Traditions have been changing and developing on both sides. The changes made by E. G. Whitlam have been widely discussed. Three years and as many months after the election of the first Hawke Government Labor traditions themselves are being rewritten.

In this paper I shall use the policy area of the function and administration of public sector enterprises in order to demonstrate the depth and significance of this change. It has been said also that the Hawke Government has reduced politics to pronouncements from the Kirribilli Cabinet and non‐productive factional squabbling. The ‘fourth graders’ of the Hawke Government, which apparently includes members of the outer Cabinet as well as the backbenchers, have been excluded from the policy‐making process. This is notwithstanding the firm intentions of the Report of Task Force on Government Administration.

The public sector area can be used to demonstrate shifts along four axes, (i) Significant frontbenchers have been bent upon changing the rhetoric, so that the activities of public sector enterprises are assessed in terms like ‘efficiency’ and ‘dollar rationality’. Change in rhetoric is part of a wider tendency to reject appeals to traditional Labor imagery (such as equality, welfare, the public sector as a good in its own right and other social as opposed to economic goals).

(ii) This, in turn, is related to a rejection of the traditional Labor practices whereby the Labor Party Platform (which could broadly be seen as a pro‐public enterprise document) is no longer seen by significant members of the Labor front‐bench as the most important guide to policy, (iii) Other sources of policy have become more salient, in the case of public sector enterprises, the rhetoric and ideas of the Department of Finance have become prominent (iv) The changing tone of the rhetoric has reflected to a small extent changes being made to official party theology as expressed in the Party Platform. Key individuals have successfully opposed left‐wing challenges to maintain and to shore up the role of the public sector and of public sector enterprises. To the extent that the Platform will retain its traditional symbolic role these activities are significant.

Policy‐making has been about domination from above and the ‘crowding out’ of traditional ideas and their sources. Control, however, has not always been successful. Sources of objection have included the Left Faction of Caucus, key Ministerial Departments (viz. Transport and Communications) dealing with public sector enterprises, and the Ministers themselves.     

The Calibanisation of the South in the German public ‘Euro crisis’ discourse

This article highlights the renaissance of the essentialist topos of the ‘lazy and irrational’ ‘Südländer’ (Southerner, Southern countries, South) in the German political and media discourses during the ‘Euro crisis’. It argues that it served to legitimate the political and economic measures taken in Southern European countries that pushed them into still more peripheral positions within the European Union (EU) and deepened the cleavage between North and South. Culture, or better culturalism and racism as its political ideological version, thus were used as a trap, as an intellectual battleground for justifying extremely complex economic and political decisions in a simplistic fashion throughout a crucial period of European history. The article furthermore demonstrates how a postcolonial reading may productively decode the processes of Othering taking place within Europe itself, especially between the so-called core and peripheral countries.     

Freedom of speech and racial vilification in Australia: ‘The Bolt case’ in public discourse

This article examines the public discourse that emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 decision of the Federal Court of Australia in Eatock v Bolt. We characterise the narrative of ‘the Bolt case’ as a ‘mobilising discourse’ that countered rather than echoed the decision itself. This discourse had three main messages: encouraging scepticism about the authenticity of fair-skinned Aboriginal persons and judgment by non-Aboriginal persons about the legitimacy of Aboriginal identity according to skin colour; questioning the legitimacy of racial vilification laws and strengthening a libertarian conception of freedom of speech. We explain how such a contrary discourse became dominant in the wake of a successful racial vilification action and consider the implications of these events.

本文研究了2011年澳大利亚联邦法庭就伊脱克诉博尔特案做出判决后的公众议论。博尔特案的叙事属于“动员话语”,是对判决的反弹而非反响。该话语主要包括三个信息：鼓励对浅肤色原住人士的真实性的质疑,鼓励由非原住人士根据肤色判定原住民身份的合法性;质疑种族诽谤法的合理性;支持言论自由的观念。笔者解释了何以这种矛盾的话语盛行于一次成功的种族诽谤行动之后,并讨论了这些事件的影响。     

‘Lost in Thailand’: the popular geopolitics of film-induced tourism in northern Thailand

The recent blockbuster hit ‘Lost in Thailand’ had more than USD $200 million in ticket sales in China in 2012, and quickly became the nation’s highest-grossing homegrown film ever. Set in northern Thailand, the film has since contributed to the prodigious growth of Chinese tourism in the region. Among other experiences, film-induced tourism in northern Thailand includes the re-enactment of scenes from the film on university campuses, in temples and around the city of Chiang Mai. These intertextual performances have made headlines in national and international media for how they reflect various articulations of cultural dissonance. This paper draws on structured interviews among Thai residents and Chinese tourists, as well as a discourse analysis of English- and Thai-language media reports to argue that popular responses to the impact of film-induced tourism in the region are strongly embedded in historical and contemporary Sino-Thai political-economic relations and corollary geopolitical imaginaries of place. These imaginaries are frequently reconstituted through the ambivalent economies of tourism encounters. This paper contributes to emerging research on how geopolitical assemblages are co-constituted by a range of popular discourses, tourism practices, media engagements, and political-economic relations and how they inform popular geopolitical experience of and in place.     

Criminalising commercial surrogacy in Canada and Australia: the political construction of ‘national consensus’

This article examines the language used to justify a criminal prohibition on commercial surrogacy in Canada and Australia. I demonstrate that legislators in each country framed commercial surrogacy as an area over which there was national ‘consensus’ because of uniquely Canadian and Australian values. This was an effective political strategy, but for different reasons in each country: in Canada, because it fit with frames surrounding healthcare and anti-commercialisation, and in Australia, because the distinction between ‘altruistic’ and ‘commercial’ surrogacy mapped onto broader themes of altruism in Australian society. This suggests that the political use of national frames is especially successful when it taps into pre-existing narratives of what constitutes unacceptable behaviour in a given polity, and when it is attached to criminal prohibitions.     

The spatial practice of public engagement: ‘doing’ geography in the South Wales valleys

This paper explores the spatial practices of public engagement through the consideration of an audio walk project that took place in Ebbw Vale in the summer of 2010. In the current political climate public engagement is often seen as a universal good, a way of demonstrating the productive dialogues that exist between ‘experts’ and their manifold publics. As studies in science communication have shown, however, this is a little misleading, for the term ‘public engagement’ masks a great diversity of projects and initiatives, which vary in the degree, methods and effectiveness of their engagement. In this paper, we argue that what is missing from many of these critiques is an attentiveness to the ‘placing’ and ‘spacing’ of our public engagement practices: where we work, who we work with and how we work all affect the nature, meaning and effectiveness of public engagement. Drawing on the idea of spatial practices, this paper explores the situated doing of the Ebbw Vale audio walk project.     

The ‘turn to the victim’ in Italian culture: victim-centred narratives of the anni di piombo

This article considers the emergence of a corpus of victim centred-narratives addressing the experience of political violence during the anni di piombo in the period surrounding the establishment of the ‘Day of Memory for the Victims of Terrorism’. Bringing a critical victim-studies approach to bear, it explores how the victim of terrorism is portrayed in the corpus of victim-centred narratives and asks what is claimed, effected and achieved by the corpus in cultural terms. It further explores how the perspective of survivors of terrorist attacks and of relatives of the victims reshapes the cultural imaginary of the anni di piombo in the new millennium.     

The league of leagues: Meta-populism and the ‘chain of equivalence’ in a cross-border Alpine area

Radical right populist parties claim to act on behalf of people who need to be protected from a series of risks initiated by ‘others’. Border control is a key topic in the narratives developed by these movements in Europe. However, populist parties located in different states can shape a cohesive discourse across state borders with regard to the protection of the people. They consequently forge a discursive ‘chain of equivalence’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. 144) implying the reduction of state-bounded differences while preserving some territorial singularities. This process, which can be termed ‘meta-populism’ (de Cleen, 2017, p. 356) supposes a series of interactions, which are not often analysed in Europe's borderlands. Based on a Critical Discourse analysis, we investigate the building-up of transregional meta-populism powered by two regionalist parties positioned in different states, but located in a single European area: the Regio Insubrica in-between Italy and Switzerland.     

‘We or them,’ ‘you and I,’ and ‘I’: spaces of intimacy and (not so) public displays of affection in Hanoi

Through an exploratory study of romantic heterosexual couples in a public park situated in Hanoi’s outskirts, this article offers a conceptual rethinking of a western understanding of the park’s public/private dichotomy which can then be used to better appreciate how these categories are evolving in western urbanizing societies and their impacts on gender relations. By developing a relational, spatialized understanding of how young romantic couples justify their ‘transgressive’ displays of sexual intimacy in public spaces in contemporary urban Vietnam, this article focuses on how couples, especially women, manage their visibility. This analysis confronts the public civilizational discourse on Vietnamese sexual restraint by analyzing how young couples justify their romantic displays by creating an intimate space within a public environment. This space of visible intimacy is justified through their commitment to marriage. For the individuals involved in these romantic couples, visibility is justified, particularly for young women, through the enjoyment of a newly gained sexual autonomy as they migrate to the city.     

‘The Darroch affair’: Assemblage lines,components, and transformations

This article examines the underresearched role of lines and components in recomposing geopolitical assemblages. It does so by focusing on a single body at the middle of an event to show how its lines of assembling conditioned wider transformations. The event in question – the leaking of confidential diplomatic materials in July 2019 as part of the so-called “Darroch Affair” – opened a massive rift between governing and bureaucratic arms of the UK state. Set in the context of ongoing struggles to recode the transatlantic diplomatic assemblage (TADA) by US and UK governments, Sir Kim Darroch, British Ambassador to the US, was at front and centre of the resulting leaks imbroglio. Using assemblage thinking, I offer an alternative conceptualisation of Darroch's body as distributed across the TADA via structurally complex lines of assembling. I argue the historical trajectories of these lines accelerated assemblage recompositions as the excessiveness of events led to Darroch's body occupying more and more possibility spaces across the TADA. The article considers how the linear complexity of Darroch's body arose, and the consequences of the resulting recompositions of the TADA for its nested diplomatic worlds.