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Pop-Up Civics in 21st Century America: Understanding the Political Potential of Placemaking (Routledge Research in American Politics and Governance)
by Ryan SalzmanHow people associate and engage in politics in the 21st century is notably different from similar behaviors in the 20th century. Ryan Salzman examines the political potential of placemaking, an increasingly popular set of behaviors that were unfamiliar to the American public until the last two decades. Placemaking exemplifies a shift that is occurring in the way Americans participate in their political system, and it appears that that participation is increasingly effective in the context of American democracy. Informed by interviews, surveys, and material review, Salzman compares the process of placemaking to traditional political and associational behaviors, providing evidence that placemaking has tremendous political potential. Placemaking is an innovative set of behaviors, largely understood to influence economic and community development. From painting crosswalks to community gardens, Americans are engaging in their communities with real political and civic consequences. This text expands our understanding of placemaking, updating the way we think about civic and political engagement in the 21st century. Pop-Up Civics in 21st Century America: Understanding the Political Potential of Placemaking will be of interest to those who study and research political behavior, civil society, arts and politics, social movements, and urban public policy.
Pope Francis Among the Wolves: The Inside Story of a Revolution
by Marco PolitiA behind-the-scenes view of the power struggles within the Vatican and &“a look inside the byzantine halls of the institutional Catholic Church.&”—Publishers Weekly A journalist who has long covered the Vatican, Marco Politi takes us deep inside the struggle roiling the Roman Curia and the Catholic Church worldwide, beginning with Benedict XVI, the pope who famously resigned in 2013, and intensifying with the unexpected election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, now known as Pope Francis. Politi&’s account balances the perspectives of Pope Francis&’s supporters, Benedict&’s sympathizers, and those disappointed members of the laity who feel alienated by the institution&’s secrecy, financial corruption, and refusal to modernize. Politi dramatically recounts the sexual scandals that have rocked the church and the accusations of money laundering and other financial misdeeds swirling around the Vatican and the Italian Catholic establishment, and how Pope Francis&’s attempts to address these crimes has been met with resistance from entrenched factions. He writes of the decline in church attendance and vocations to the priesthood as the church continues to prohibit divorced and remarried Catholics from receiving Communion. He visits European parishes where women perform the functions of missing male priests—and where the remaining parishioners would welcome the ordination of women, if the church would allow it. Pope Francis&’s emphasis on pastoral compassion for all who struggle with the burden of family life has also provoked the ire of traditionalists. He knows from experience what life is like for the poor in South America and elsewhere, and highlights the contrast between the vital, vibrant faith of these parishioners and the disillusionment of European Catholics. As Pope Francis and his supporters are locked in battle with the defenders of the traditional hard line and with ecclesiastical corruption, the future of Catholicism is at stake—and it is far from certain Francis will succeed in saving the institution from decline.
Pope Francis and Interreligious Dialogue: Religious Thinkers Engage with Recent Papal Initiatives (Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue)
by Harold Kasimow Alan RaceThis book engages thinkers from different religious and humanist traditions in response to Pope Francis’s pronouncements on interreligious dialogue. The contributors write from the perspectives of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Humanism. Each author elaborates on how the pope’s openness to dialogue and invitation to practical collaboration on global concerns represents a significant achievement as the world faces an uncertain future. The theological tension within the Catholic double commitment to evangelization on the one hand, and dialogue on the other, remains unresolved for most writers, but this does not prevent them from praising the strong invitation to dialogue–especially with the focus on justice, peace, and ecological sustainability.
Pope Francis and the Caring Society
by Robert M. WhaplesPope Francis and the Caring Society is a thoughtful and in-depth exploration of the Pope&’s earnest call for a dialogue on building a truly compassionate society.Francis&’s fervent support for uplifting the poor and protecting the environment has inspired far-reaching discussions worldwide: What is the most effective way to fight poverty? Can environmental resources be better protected with property rights? Are the poor better off under a market economy? And what value does a religious perspective offer in addressing moral, political, and economic problems? Pope Francis and the Caring Society is an indispensable resource for consideration of these vital questions. Edited by Robert M. Whaples, with a foreword by Michael Novak, the book provides an integrated perspective on Francis and the issues he has raised, examining the intersection of religion, politics, and economics. Readers will discover important historical and cultural context for considering Francis&’s views, along with non-bureaucratic solutions for environmental preservation, an analysis of Francis&’s criticism of power and privilege, the case for market-based entrepreneurship and private charity as the essential tools for fighting poverty, and an examination of Francis&’s philosophy of the family. Pope Francis and the Caring Society is essential reading for anyone interested in creating a better, more caring, and prosperous world.
Pope Francis as a Global Actor: Where Politics And Theology Meet (Palgrave Studies in Religion, Politics, and Policy)
by Alynna J. Lyon Christine A. Gustafson Paul Christopher ManuelPope Francis confuses many observers because his papacy does not fit neatly into any pre-established classificatory schemes. To gain a deeper appreciation of Francis’s complicated papacy, this volume proposes that an interdisciplinary approach, fusing concepts derived from moral theology and the social sciences, may properly situate Pope Francis as a global political entrepreneur. The chapters in this volume ask what difference it makes that he is the first pope from Latin America, how and why different countries in the world respond to him, how his understanding of scripture informs his ideas on economic, social, and environmental policy, and where politics meets theology under Francis. In the end, this volume seeks to provide a more robust understanding of the enigmatic papacy of Francis.
Pope Francis: From the End of the Earth to Rome
by The Staff of the Wall Street JournalOn March 13, the cardinals of the Catholic Church, gathered to elect a successor to a living Pope for the first time in 600 years, announced a dramatic shift. By elevating Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina to become Pope Francis the 266th Pontiff, the cardinals were naming the first-ever Pope from the growing New World to take the helm of the church at a crucial moment.It was a stunning move by a 2,000-year-old institution that has immense influence—with 1.2 billion adherents worldwide—and huge problems, including a decade-old sex-abuse scandal that has shattered faith in the institution, a shortage of priests and secular trends that have drained the church of members and challenged its relevancy in a changing world.From the shocking decision by Pope Benedict XVI to retire, to the introduction of Pope Francis, from the back streets of Buenos Aires to the front row at St. Peter's Square, reporters from The Wall Street Journal have chronicled these dramatic weeks in the life of the oldest institution in the world. Now, in a new e-book, Journal reporters will present a detailed, timely and original biography of the new Pope Francis, as well as new insight on the bargaining and drama that surrounded his rise. Pope Francis will present the full, in-depth story of the church's change in direction and the man charged with leading it, and consider how Pope Francis might address the years of scandal and shortcomings while leading Catholics worldwide toward a deeper faith.
Pope Francis: The Story of the Holy Father
by Marie DuhamelFrom the moment he was elected into the papacy, Pope Francis has captured the attention of the world with his humility, charisma, and reformist spirit.This one-of-a-kind, illustrated biography of the first Jesuit pope offers more than 250 photographs and 50 removable documents from Francis's life. Written by Vatican Radio reporter Marie Duhamel, this intimate portrait includes his parents emigration from Italy, his birth as Jorge Mario Bergoglio in 1936, his love of soccer and opera as a child, the pneumonia that nearly cost him his life as a young adult, his calling to the priesthood, and his first encounter with poverty as a missionary in Chile that would change his life. Duhamel chronicles Francis's rise from priest to bishop to cardinal to the papacy and how, along the way, he impressed many people-and alienated some-with his courage to stand up to authority and his dedication to helping the poor.Enclosed documents such as his baptism certificate, photographs from his childhood, pages from a school notebook, handwritten notes as pope, and even a support card for his beloved San Lorenzosoccer club, further illuminate his life and create a lasting keepsake of this pope of the people.
Pope Patrick
by Peter De RosaThe year is 2009. America has its first Catholic president since Kennedy. The planet's other superpower is the Federation of Islamic Republics, stretching from Morocco to Pakistan. And in Rome, the aging Polish Pope, obstinate and combative to the end, has died, and the conclave of cardinals must choose a successor. After a great deal of argument and debate, they choose the least controversial candidate, the least political, the one least likely to upset the Vatican status quo--Brian O'Flynn, a kindly old Irish priest who reads Yeats and publishes obscure academic theses. At the moment of his election, a 300-pound ornamental pillar falls on his head. Then all hell breaks loose. Pope Patrickis the riotous story of a mild-mannered country cardinal who--through a democratic election, a twist of fate, and a little help from his golden Lab, Charley--turns the Vatican upside down and throws the industrial world into chaos. He deals once and for all with the thorny issues of contraception, the celibacy of the clergy, and the infallibility of the pope; sends the Dow Jones tumbling, and the hopes of the downtrodden soaring-and in the process brings the world to the brink of catastrophe. By turns funny, tender, exciting, and controversial,Pope Patrickis a scathingly brilliant, delightfully droll novel of principles, power, and faith-the story of the holiest, bravest, most likable pope since St. Peter.
Popper's Open Society After Fifty Years
by Ian Jarvie Sandra PralongPopper's Open Society After Fifty Years presents a coherent survey of the reception and influence of Karl Popper's masterpiece The Open Society and its Enemies over the fifty years since its publication in 1945, as well as applying some of its principles to the context of modern Eastern Europe.This unique volume contains papers by many of Popper's contemporaries and friends, including such luminaries as Ernst Gombrich, in his paper 'The Open Society and its Enemies: Remembering its Publication Fifty Years Ago'.
Poppies, Politics, and Power: Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy
by James Tharin BradfordHistorians have long neglected Afghanistan's broader history when portraying the opium industry. But in Poppies, Politics, and Power, James Tharin Bradford rebalances the discourse, showing that it is not the past forty years of lawlessness that makes the opium industry what it is, but the sheer breadth of the twentieth-century Afghanistan experience. Rather than byproducts of a failed contemporary system, argues Bradford, drugs, especially opium, were critical components in the formation and failure of the Afghan state.In this history of drugs and drug control in Afghanistan, Bradford shows us how the country moved from licit supply of the global opium trade to one of the major suppliers of hashish and opium through changes in drug control policy shaped largely by the outside force of the United States. Poppies, Politics, and Power breaks the conventional modes of national histories that fail to fully encapsulate the global nature of the drug trade. By providing a global history of opium within the borders of Afghanistan, Bradford demonstrates that the country's drug trade and the government's position on that trade were shaped by the global illegal market and international efforts to suppress it. By weaving together this global history of the drug trade and drug policy with the formation of the Afghan state and issues within Afghan political culture, Bradford completely recasts the current Afghan, and global, drug trade.
Popular Agency and Politicisation in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Beyond the Vote (Palgrave Studies in Political History)
by Diego Palacios Cerezales Oriol LujánThis book provides an entry point to the most cutting-edge lines of research on popular political mobilisation in Europe. It brings together leading scholars from Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands and Spain. The chapters explore the connected dimensions of popular participation within different countries and across borders, covering the topics of iconoclasm, popular acclamations, street politics, associations, petitions and electoral agitation. Focusing on the role of disenfranchised citizens and women, this collection broadens the themes of traditional political historical research that has identified political participation with the right to vote and struggles for political inclusion, and brings a wide array of formal and informal political practices to the centre of nineteenth-century European life. A must-read for scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students wishing to explore multiple dimensions of the history of political engagement and politicisation.
Popular Capitalism (Routledge Revivals)
by Sir John RedwoodSir John Redwood has been at the centre of the movement to speed up the growth in wealth and income around the world through the rediscovery of private enterprise. In the United Kingdom, he has argued and written for privatisation, deregulation, and wider ownership—policies he helped to implement as a government adviser and as Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit. Elsewhere, in countries as diverse as Jamaica, New Zealand, Singapore, and France, he has advised governments on industrial policies and privatisation and has supervised major share issues.In Popular Capitalism (first published in 1988 and now with a new preface by the author) Redwood draws on his wide-ranging experience to illustrate major economic changes happening around the world. He shows that privatisation, deregulation, venture capital, wider ownership, debt repayment and the growth of new markets are all scenes in a larger drama: the story of how the world is responding to the failure of public sector led growth and to the overburdening of debt that has so damaged countries, companies, and even banks. Popular capitalism is a worldwide phenomenon, embracing Latin America, Gorbachev’s reforms, China’s own style of local capitalism, and the large government privatisation programmes of the developed world.
Popular Cinema and Politics in South India: The Films of MGR and Rajinikanth
by S. RajanayagamThis work breaks new ground in the understanding of South Indian cinema and politics. Through incisive analysis and original concepts it illustrates the private, public and cinematic personas of MGR and Rajinikanth. It challenges the popular and scholarly myths surrounding them and shows the constant negotiation of their on-screen and off-screen identities. The book revisits the entire political history of post-Independent Tamil Nadu through its cinema,and presents a refreshing psycho-political and cultural map of contemporary South India. This absorbing volume will be an important read for scholars, teachers and students of film studies, culture and media studies, and politics, especially those interested in South India.
Popular Culture In Chile: Resistance And Survival
by Kenneth Aman Cristian ParkerFirst published in 1991. An implicit thesis of this volume is that popular culture in Chile is more than the total of many individual biographies. It requires a new analysis of society as a whole and of social change. Too often, political scientists and other social analysts have seen social change as proceeding from the top down. One can interpre
Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon: The Fairouz and Rahbani Nation (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures #Vol. 18)
by Christopher StoneBased on an award-winning thesis, this volume is a pioneering study of musical theatre and popular culture and its relation to the production of identity in Lebanon in the second half of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of the departure of the French from Lebanon and the civil violence of 1958, the Rahbani brothers (Asi and Mansour) staged a series of folkloric musical theatrical extravaganzas at the annual Ba‘labakk festival which highlighted the talents of Asi’s wife, the Lebanese diva Fairouz, arguably the most famous living Arab singer. The inclusion of these folkloric vignettes into the festival’s otherwise European dominated cultural agenda created a powerful nation-building combination of what Partha Chatterjee calls the ‘appropriation of the popular’ and the ‘classicization of tradition.’ The Rahbani project coincides with the confluence of increasing internal and external migration in Lebanon, as well as with the rapid development of mass media technology, of which the Ba'labakk festival can be seen as an extension. Employing theories of nationalism, modernity, globalism and locality, this book shows that these factors combined to give the project a potent identity-forming power. Popular Culture and Nationalism in Lebanon is the first study of Fairouz and the Rahbani family in English and will appeal to students and researchers in the field of Middle East studies, Popular culture and musical theatre.
Popular Culture and Popular Protest in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Routledge Library Editions: Political Protest #16)
by Michael MullettThis book, first published in 1987, looks at the culture of the masses and at the political language and actions of the crowd. It examines the enduring traits of a European demotic culture that was largely non-literate, and it then goes on to show how the political outlook of the lower classes arose from the moral attitudes contained in their culture, a culture that was deeply suffused by Christianity. Unlike upper-class culture, popular culture is resistant to change and has to be studied over a long period – in this case the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Because its themes – popular social values, riot and revolt – are pervasive over both time and space, the book’s geographical coverage is extensive, taking in most of western and central Europe.
Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change
by Henry Jenkins William Proctor Elisabeth Soep Jonathan Gray Stephen Duncombe Sarah Banet-Weiser Ethan Zuckerman Rebecca Wanzo Sam Ford Sangita Shresthova Candis Callison Michael Saler Manisha Pathak-Shelat Gabriel Peters-Lazaro Christopher Harris Joan Miller Clifford Lee Thomas J Billard Lauren Levitt Taylor Cole Miller Raffi Sarkissian Sarah Van Wart Tapan Parikh Emilia Yang Andrea Alarcón Diana Lee Brooklyne Gipson Jocelyn Kelvin Donna Do-own Kim Yomna Elsayed Sulafa Zidani Rachel E. Moran Paromita Sengupta Clint Schnekloth Ioana Mischie Rogelio Alejandro LopezWinner, 2021 Ray and Pat Browne Edited Collection Award, given by the Popular Culture AssociationHow popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions.A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.
Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change
by Henry Jenkins Sangita Shresthova Gabriel Peters-LazaroHow popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions.A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.
Popular Culture and the State in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge Studies in Asia's Transformations)
by Nissim Otmazgin Eyal Ben-AriThis volume examines the relations between popular culture production and export and the state in East and Southeast Asia including the urban centres and middle-classes of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, and the Philippines. It addresses the shift in official thinking toward the role of popular culture in the political life of states brought about by the massive circulation of cultural commodities and the possibilities for attaining "soft power". In contrast to earlier studies, this volume pays particular attention to the role of states and cross-state cultural interactions in these processes. It is the first major attempt to look at these issues comparatively and to provide an important corrective to the limitations of existing scholarship on popular culture in Asia that have usually neglected its political aspects. As part of this move, the essays in this volume suggest a widening of disciplinary perspectives. Hitherto, the preponderance of relevant studies has been in cultural and media fields, anthropology or history. Here the contributors explicitly draw on other disciplinary perspectives – political science and international relations, political economy, law, and policy studies – to explore the complex interrelationships between the state, politics and economics, and popular culture. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian culture, society and politics, the sociology of culture, political science and media studies.
Popular Culture in Hong Kong After the National Security Law, 2020–2022 (Routledge Contemporary Asia Series)
by Janet NgIn this study, Ng examines the aftermath of the massive protests in 2019 and the implementation of the National Security Law in Hong Kong.Despite 2 years of fluctuating COVID measures and social constraints, the city witnessed an unparalleled cultural resurgence after the enactment of the National Security Law in 2020. This book explores Hong Kong beyond the end of the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in 2019, to examine what happened afterward, how society repaired itself, how the people of the city resumed their everyday life, and what this everyday life entails. Ng examines the social debates and conversations during these 2 years, analyzing a wide range of creative projects in the city, from television shows, popular music, and social media to literary writings. She describes the difficulties, emotional experiences, and also daily strategies to repair local life, recreate a self-identity, and reclaim the city’s narrative against the pressures from China.This book is a valuable resource for researchers, scholars, students, and general readers interested in popular culture and society, and the global uprisings of the first decades of the twenty-first century. The study, supported by detailed research, also makes this essential reading for those with a specialized interest in global studies, and China and Hong Kong studies.
Popular Culture in Indonesia: Fluid Identities in Post-Authoritarian Politics (Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia)
by Ariel HeryantoThis book examines popular culture in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, and the third largest democracy. It provides a full account of the key trends since the collapse of the authoritarian Suharto regime (1998), a time of great change in Indonesian society more generally. It explains how one of the most significant results of the deepening industrialization in Southeast Asia since the 1980s has been the expansion of consumption and new forms of media, and that Indonesia is a prime example of this development. It goes on to show that although the Asian economic crisis in 1997 had immediate and negative impacts on incumbent governments, as well as the socioeconomic life for most people in the region, at the same time popular cultures have been dramatically reinvigorated as never before. It includes analysis of important themes, including political activism and citizenship, gender, class, age and ethnicity. Throughout, it shows how the multilayered and contradictory processes of identity formation in Indonesia are inextricably linked to popular culture. This is one of the first books on Indonesia's media and popular culture in English. It is a significant addition to the literature on Asian popular culture, and will be of interest to anyone who is interested in new developments in media and popular culture in Indonesia and Asia.
Popular Culture in Taiwan: Charismatic Modernity (Routledge Research On Taiwan Ser.)
by Marc L. MoskowitzThe growing field of popular culture studies in Taiwan can be divided into two distinct academic trends; a different analytical framework is used to examine either locally oriented popular culture or transnational pop culture. This volume combine these two academic trends, firstly by revealing that localized popular culture in Taiwan is in many ways a merging of Chinese, Japanese, American, and indigenous cultures and therefore is a form of hybridity that arose long before the term became popular. Secondly, the chapters show that the transnational character of Taiwan’s pop culture is one of the more important ways that it distinguishes itself from mainland China. In other words, it is precisely Taiwan’s transnational hybrid character that helps to define it as a distinctive local space. The contributors explore how traditional Chinese influences modern localized lives in Taiwan, localized identity, culture, and politics as a contested domain with Chinese and traditional Taiwanese identities and Taiwan’s localization process as contesting Taiwan’s gravitation towards globalized Western culture. Including chapters on baseball, poetry, pop music, puppets and Harry Potter, Popular Culture in Taiwan is an accessible and stimulating read for those studying the culture and society of Taiwan and China as well as cultural studies more generally.
Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism: Why women are in refrigerators and other stories (Popular Culture and World Politics)
by Penny GriffinWhile some have argued that we live in a ‘postfeminist’ era that renders feminism irrelevant to people’s contemporary lives this book takes ‘feminism’, the source of eternal debate, contestation and ambivalence, and situates the term within the popular, cultural practices of everyday life. It explores the intimate connections between the politics of feminism and the representational practices of contemporary popular culture, examining how feminism is ‘made sensible’ through visual imagery and popular culture representations. It investigates how popular culture is produced, represented and consumed to reproduce the conditions in which feminism is valued or dismissed, and asks whether antifeminism exists in commodity form and is commercially viable. Written in an accessible style and analysing a broad range of popular culture artefacts (including commercial advertising, printed and digital news-related journalism and commentary, music, film, television programming, websites and social media), this book will be of use to students, researchers and practitioners of International Relations, International Political Economy and gender, cultural and media studies.
Popular Culture, Social Media, and the Politics of Identity (Popular Culture and World Politics)
by William ClaptonPopular Culture, Social Media, and the Politics of Identity advances a novel methodological approach – pop culture as political object – to capture the centrality of popular culture as an object of a broad range of political contests and debates that constitute pop culture artefacts by generating and informing specific meanings and understandings of them.It is no longer novel to claim that popular culture matters to world politics. The literature on Popular Culture and World Politics (PCWP) has demonstrated the cultural basis of political action and meaning-making. However, this book argues that in doing so, the PCWP literature has focused primarily on the traditionally narrow range of issues, actors, and things that mainstream International Relations regards as part of world politics. While PCWP challenges restrictive disciplinary understandings of the sites of legitimate inquiry where one can purposefully gain knowledge about world politics, comparatively little has been done to challenge constricted understandings of what world politics is, who it involves, and where it takes place. Methodological approaches in the literature largely treat popular culture and politics as separate and therefore focus on understanding how popular culture relates to and intersects with a relatively circumscribed notion of world politics. Focusing on the everyday politics of how audiences perceive and contest popular cultural artefacts, this book demonstrates that pop culture does not merely intersect with or reflect discrete political processes; it is also directly situated as an object of politics. The author analyses current debates over identity politics across a range of contemporary pop cultural artefacts, including films and video games.This book will be of interest to scholars and students of International Relations, Political Science, and Cultural and Media Studies.
Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation
by Gianpaolo Baiocchi Ernesto GanuzaLocal participation is the new democratic imperative. In the United States, three-fourths of all cities have developed opportunities for citizen involvement in strategic planning. The World Bank has invested $85 billion over the last decade to support community participation worldwide. But even as these opportunities have become more popular, many contend that they have also become less connected to actual centers of power and the jurisdictions where issues relevant to communities are decided. With this book, Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Ernesto Ganuza consider the opportunities and challenges of democratic participation. Examining how one mechanism of participation has traveled the world--with its inception in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and spread to Europe and North America--they show how participatory instruments have become more focused on the formation of public opinion and are far less attentive to, or able to influence, actual reform. Though the current impact and benefit of participatory forms of government is far more ambiguous than its advocates would suggest, Popular Democracy concludes with suggestions of how participation could better achieve its political ideals.