Pedagogic Questions: Teaching Popular Culture and World Politics

What should the status of pop culture be in 'traditional' disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities? 

Don't worry, I'm not going to give up the focus in the blog of teaching and thinking about ethics. But thought I'd share some thoughts on the relationship between popular culture and world politics in the curriculum. If we started a first year module in International Relations by getting students to watch Independence Day or Lord of the Flies would we be denying them the opportunity to engage with the traditional paradigms of international relations long-associated with undergraduate programmes in international politics?

As I type today's blog entry from the Popular Culture and World Politics at Stockholm University, I'm Can and indeed should we engage the visual, the aesthetic, the poetical in thinking about pedagogy in international politics?
conscious of the fact that the discourses of international relations are largely taught (and processed) as textual discourses.

Nick Robinson (University of Leeds) asks: Should we be using popular culture as an artefact in its own right or just as a way (a pedagogical tool) to open up theory in the discipline of International Relations?
If we bring popular culture into the IR curriculum does this mean that you are 'dumbing down' the discipline?

There are important question to reflect upon as the panel progresses, do students get something extra from thinking about how international politics is iterated through forms of popular culture?

Is there a danger that if we don't think about different forms that world politics takes that we replicate the vision of international politics as depicted in Baylis and Smith's Globalization of World Politics. This is a world which starts with anarchy (the ontological problem of IR), suggests that the world has liberal institutions (yes, but, so what?), is formed exploitatively through markets (Marxists R Us) and then has a few 'issues' to do with the left out (post-colonialism, gender, sexualities etc).

We should be not treating IR theory as flattened accounts of the international system, but locating the co-constitutive nature of both traditional theory and popular culture artefacts in thinking about international politics.

Watch this space for further thoughts.

P.S. Thanks to the panel for a great discussion: Matt Davies, Kyle Grayson, David Mutiner, and Simon Philpott.