It has become expected of policy-makers, pundits, and scholars to refer to a whole raft of global dilemmas—from the economic downturn to climate change—as complex. The complexity of these challenges intimates a pattern of interactions marked by sharp discontinuities and exponential transformations triggered by incremental changes. Yet, how are global publics making sense of such complexity?

This course claims that representations of world politics  in popular culture play a contingent, yet undeniably prominent role in shaping our collective understanding of the ongoing turbulence. The global political arena is expansive, complicated, and often confusing and cinematic representations assist many of us in developing an understanding of: What counts as “international relations”? Which problems are “political”? How do the choices of people in one nation affect others around the world? Why do states behave the way they do? Do individuals have any influence in global politics? Is the world governed by norms, or power, or some combination? etc. The objective of this course is to introduce students to the analysis of popular culture as rendered in film representations, and to relate these analyses to our understandings of the complexity of global life.

Lecturer: Prof. Emilian Kavalski, Jagiellonian University (Poland)