| Summary/Abstract |
This special issue presents a challenge to the division of critical geopolitics that has come to frame the sub-discipline. Instead of thinking about popular geopolitics as the way in which geopolitical practice escapes the formal realms of statecraft, academia and think-tanks, Woodyer and Carter, and the other contributing authors here, suggest we instead reframe our inquiry around the domestication of geopolitics. Woodyer and Carter suggest that this responds to recent moves within critical geopolitics to go beyond the discursive to reformulate geopolitics as “an encounter between texts, objects, bodies and practices”. It challenges the intentionality of representations sometimes assumed by popular geopolitics where the “agency of cultural producers has been prioritised over that of audiences, that textual and discursive methods have been prioritised over more embodied and affective approaches” – leaving more openness for play and mis-/re- interpretation – and it challenges the privileging of certain sites (most notably, different forms of mass media) that have tended to dominate this approach since its inception.
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