In this book, originally published in 1985, British and North American geographers present original and challenging viewpoints on the media. The essays deal with a diverse content, ranging from the presentation of news to the nature of television programming and from rock music lyrics to film visions of the city.

In this book, originally published in 1985, British and North American geographers present original and challenging viewpoints on the media. The essays deal with a diverse content, ranging from the presentation of news to the nature of television programming and from rock music lyrics to film visions of the city.

Now in a thoroughly revised edition, this innovative and engaging text surveys the field of popular geopolitics, exploring the relationship between popular culture and international relations from a geographical perspective. Jason Dittmer and Daniel Bos connect global issues with the questions of identity and subjectivity that we feel as individuals, arguing that who we think we are influences how we understand the world. Building on the strengths of the first edition, each chapter focuses on a specific theme—such as representation, audience, and affect—by explaining the concept and then outlining some of the emerging debates that have revolved around it. New and updated case studies—including heritage and social media—help illustrate the significance of the concepts and capture the ways popular culture shapes our understandings of geopolitics within everyday life. Students will enjoy the text's accessibility and colorful examples, and instructors will appreciate the way the book brings together a diverse, multidisciplinary literature and makes it understandable and relevant.

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people’s favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview and holistic analysis of the intersection between tourism and popular culture. It examines current debates, questions and controversies of tourism in the wake of popular culture phenomena and explores the relationships between popular culture, globalization, tourism and mobility. In addition, it offers a cross-disciplinary, cutting edge review of the character of popular cultural production and consumption trends, analyzing their consequences for tourism, spatial strategies and destination competitiveness. The scope of the volume encompasses various expressions of popular culture such as cinema, TV shows, music, literature, sports and heritage. Featuring a mix of theoretical and empirical chapters, the handbook problematizes and conceptualizes the ties and clusters of popular cultural actors, thereby positioning tourism within the wider context of creative economies, cultural planning and multimodal technologies. Written by an international team of academics with expertise in a range of disciplines, this timely book will be of interest to researchers from a variety of subjects including tourism, events, geography, cultural studies, fandom research, political economy, business, media studies and technology.

Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also explores how individuals’ consumption of global media shapes their imagination of both faraway places and their own local lives. Chosen for their continuing influence, historical relationships, and different geopolitical positions, the case sites of France, Japan, and the United States provide opportunities to move beyond common dichotomies between East and West, or United States and “the rest.” From a theoretical point of view, Imagining the Global endeavors to answer the question of how one locale can help us understand another locale. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources—several years of fieldwork; extensive participant observation; more than 80 formal interviews with some 160 media consumers (and occasionally producers) in France, Japan, and the United States; and analyses of media in different languages—author Fabienne Darling-Wolf considers how global culture intersects with other significant identity factors, including gender, race, class, and geography. Imagining the Global investigates who gets to participate in and who gets excluded from global media representation, as well as how and why the distinction matters.

Militainment, Inc. offers provocative, sometimes disturbing insight into the ways that war is presented and viewed as entertainment—or "militainment"—in contemporary American popular culture. War has been the subject of entertainment for centuries, but Roger Stahl argues that a new interactive mode of militarized entertainment is recruiting its audience as virtual-citizen soldiers. The author examines a wide range of historical and contemporary media examples to demonstrate the ways that war now invites audiences to enter the spectacle as an interactive participant through a variety of channels—from news coverage to online video games to reality television. Simply put, rather than presenting war as something to be watched, the new interactive militainment presents war as something to be played and experienced vicariously. Stahl examines the challenges that this new mode of militarized entertainment poses for democracy, and explores the controversies and resistant practices that it has inspired. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between war and media, and it sheds surprising light on the connections between virtual battlefields and the international conflicts unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

This book examines different aspects of Asian popular culture, including films, TV, music, comedy, folklore, cultural icons, the Internet and theme parks. It raises important questions such as – What are the implications of popularity of Asian popular culture for globalization? Do regional forces impede the globalizing of cultures? Or does the Asian popular culture flow act as a catalyst or conveying channel for cultural globalization? Does the globalization of culture pose a threat to local culture? It addresses two seemingly contradictory and yet parallel processes in the circulation of Asian popular culture: the interconnectedness between Asian popular culture and western culture in an era of cultural globalization that turns subjects such as Pokémon, Hip Hop or Cosmopolitan into truly global phenomena, and the local derivatives and versions of global culture that are necessarily disconnected from their origins in order to cater for the local market. It thereby presents a collective argument that, whilst local social formations, and patterns of consumption and participation in Asia are still very much dependent on global cultural developments and the phenomena of modernity, yet such dependence is often concretized, reshaped and distorted by the local media to cater for the local market.

This book brings together scholars from across a variety of academic disciplines to assess the current state of the subfield of popular geopolitics. It provides an archaeology of the field, maps the flows of various frameworks of analysis into (and out of) popular geopolitics, and charts a course forward for the discipline. It explores the real-world implications of popular culture, with a particular focus on the evolving interdisciplinary nature of popular geopolitics alongside interrelated disciplines including media, cultural, and gender studies.

'Narratives in Popular Culure, Media and Everyday life provdes a sweeping coverage of the multiple facets of narrative theroy... Berger must be commended for his attempt to put together a reader friendly report on the lives of many rich and famous narrative theories' - Narrative Inquiry