Place mapping with teenagers: locating their territories and documenting their experience of the public realm

The purpose of this paper is to present, analyse and critique a research method, ‘place mapping’, used to document and understand teenagers' experience, use and perception of public spaces. Researchers in two case study sites, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Sacramento, CA, employed conventional street maps as a basis for eliciting and recording young people's spatial experiences. This method offers an effective mechanism for generating and structuring discussion – through dialogue – by the participants about their dynamic and shared experience of place, geographically recording places and ensuring equitable participation.     

#MeToo,white feminism and taking everyday politics seriously in the global political economy

ABSTRACT

This paper examines social media movements, specifically #MeToo, in relation to the politics of feminism and white privilege in the contemporary global political economy. Analysis of social media movements is located as a key part of the intricate web of practices that enable certain types of gendered identity and socioeconomic privilege to intersect, in powerful ways and to potent effect. The paper argues that, while scholarship on the global political economy has not often taken seriously popular culture sources in and across world politics, and needs to do better in this regard, investigating the politics of popular culture, race and socioeconomic privilege in contemporary world politics is important. This is because such analysis foregrounds everyday, cultural practices of knowledge formation, building space for emphasising relations of power but also highlighting the possibilities of and for resistance, agency and avenues for creative thinking and doing in world politics.     

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.