Suchergebnisse

This article examines emergent forms of political subjectivity amongst subordinate social forces, focusing on how 'unprotected' workers in household relations of production can become political subjects antagonistic to world order. For unprotected workers the very lack of institutional protection makes articulating political demands risky. At the same time, the need to conceptualise the manner in which the workers in the households and in proximate forms of social relations of production become political subjects is increasingly urgent. The article begins by articulating a conception of the public sphere relevant to the forms of political subjectivity examined. The argument then proceeds to situate the family in the global political economy. Next, the article examines the circulation of women between the household and proximate forms of social relations of production. It is in this circulation that unprotected workers produce potential and emergent counter-public spheres needed for the forms of political subjectivity that challenge the dominant forces in world order. (Original abstract)

Trade union endorsed strike action is systematically demonised in reports in the popular mainstream UK press (see for example Davies 2014), despite public opinion not reflecting this level of antagonism towards industrial action. One consistent strategy used to (mis)represent strikers is to habitually relate this form of protest to threats of intimidation and violence by using militarised discourse. We assert that a key word in the discursive construction of strikes is 'militant' and its variant forms (e.g. 'militants' and 'militancy') which is routinely used to express a negative attitude towards strikes in an attempt to smear them as a legitimate form of protest. We draw on the theory of semantic prosody to show that the sense of 'militant' is tarnished through its repeated use in reports of terrorism, often in the same edition used to report on strike action (for instance, the junior doctors' strike in the UK). We use the WMatrix corpus tool to show that in the 21st Century, 'militant' unequivocally appears in semantic domains of violence and aggression in a 274,122 word corpus of news articles from 2000-2015, and therefore this sense is carried over to trade activity when used to report on strike action. This strategy contributes to a neoliberal ideology which promotes individualism, competition and the free market, at the expense of collective action and protection of workers' rights.

In this article we offer a potential research agenda for the study of popular culture in IR and outline how this research agenda could be advanced. If the incorporation of popular culture into IR is going to be fruitful, there must be a willingness to go beyond an engagement with illustrations of world politics. Doing so will get us closer to what is at stake in the mutual implication of popular culture and world politics.