People may have wondered why spend so much time thinking about what pop culture says about international relations. They have have pondered whether dedicating entire class sessions to Harry Potter and the International Relations of Ethnic Conflict might be misguided....
I will be on a panel at 1.45pm in Indigo A with the following description:There has been a growing body of work in world politics that relies on or analyzes fictional narratives. To what extent can...
Foreign Policy's latest foray into the nexus between science fiction and political reality is a lively sketch on post-conflict reconstruction, Harry Potter style. Written by experts on the topic...
In the waning days of classes, one of my colleagues asked a student if she’d been among those celebrating outside of the White House the night that President Obama announced the killing of Osama...
I would so love to know if any of the Harry Potter books were among those Palin wanted taken out of her town's library. Maybe I'd even get to do some media again.Via Brad DeLong.... Alas, as John points out in comments, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had not yet been released. If only I had looked closely at the relevant dates, then I never would have gotten my hopes up.
With all of the important developments in world politics in need ripe for thoughtful self-important analysis at the Duck, why am I posting another review of Harry Potter and International Relations? Because I can.Frank A. Stengel in Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft: The study of popular culture is slowly gaining ground within the discipline of International Relations. Not only are more and more teachers discovering movies, music, and so on, as educational tools, but ever more researchers are systemically examining how pop culture influences, and is influenced by, international...
I find it difficult sometimes to adequately explain to Americans Vladimir Putin's popularity in Russia. We get media stories about Putin's tightening hold on media and political freedoms, and Americans automatically assume that the Russian people must resent this creeping dictatorship.Yet Putin is highly popular, with poll numbers achieved only by American presidents in the aftermath of a major crisis. His positives consistently rank in the high 70s--his disapproves are lower than Bush's approval rating.Some of Putin's popularity is easy to explain: Russia is a richer and less chaotic place...
For those who might be interested, my lecture notes from my address at Prophecy 2007 follow. Keep in mind that I departed a great deal from the text, particularly when talking about nationalism and not all of my notes add up to coherent sentences. Also, the notes I've reproduced below constituted prompts rather than text to be read verbatim. I may clean it up one day, but I don't really have the energy to do so right now.The clever subtitle of Prophecy 2007, "From Hero to Legend," raises an interesting question: has Harry Potter passed, in one way or another, into the realm of legend? Or, to...
For members of generation X like myself, Star Wars is one of the constitutive myths of our childhoods. The Force, lightsaber duels, the Millennium Falcon, "I am your father," "he's my brother," "I've got a bad feeling about this," and so on . . . this is what we grew up with. And because Star Wars was such a mega-hit, the characters and tropes and themes spawned a whole slew of allusions and invocations that continue to infiltrate popular public discussions of all kinds of things. Few pop culture artifacts achieve that level of saturation; few artists are able to shape the common cultural...
I was going to reply to Peter's comment on my last post about Harry Potter in the comments section, but it started to get too long and I thought I'd better make an actual post out of it. I am also going to try to do this without revealing anything of great significance from the plot of the seventh book (which I finished yesterday), but I can't guarantee that I won't let something slip.Also, at this point I am just going to be replying to Peter's contention that "Harry Potter is nothing more than an 'intellectually more acceptable' activity than football," suitable for the same kind of "water...
That highbrow publication, USA Weekend Magazine:Scores of absurdtie-ins include "If Harry Potter Ran General Electric," "Looking for God in Harry Potter" and our personal favorite, "Harry Potter and International Relations," in which the boy wizard is linked to real-life globalization and geopolitical issues.The bizarre thing here is actually not the criticism-based-on-title of our book (for redux, see Scott McLemee writing at Inside Higher Ed), but the accusation that Looking for God in Harry Potter is nothing more than an attempt to cash in on Potter's success.It seems that Jeffrey Resner...
Welp, we know that a new Harry Potter book is about to come out, because the Washington Post has featured the obligatory piece on Christian reactions to Harry Potter, along with a side-helping of wonderment at the rise of explicitly Christian publishing.Too bad this is so not new.The article points out that some Christians are uncomfortable with the depiction of magic in the series, and notes that literature marketed as Christian in content (as opposed to the previous thousand years or so of Christian literature which was, well, just literature) is becoming a large and important market...