The Second Reform Act, passed in 1867, created a million new voters, doubling the electorate and propelling the British state into the age of mass politics. It marked the end of a twenty year ...struggle for the working class vote, in which seven different governments had promised change. Yet the standard works on 1867 are more than forty years old and no study has ever been published of reform in prior decades.
This study provides the first analysis of the subject from 1848 to 1867, ranging from the demise of Chartism to the passage of the Second Reform Act. Recapturing the vibrancy of the issue and its place at the heart of Victorian political culture, it focuses not only on the reform debate itself, but on a whole series of related controversies, including the growth of trade unionism, the impact of the 1848 revolutions and the discussion of French and American democracy.
Genealogy is now a global industry, accounting for $3 billion every year in the US market alone. Enhanced via public record digitisation, crowd-sourced data input, and consumer genetics testing, ...interest in one's ancestral roots has never been higher. Recognising the public interest in personal lineages, the BBC launched the docuseries Who Do You Think You Are? in 2004. Focusing on celebrities' family backgrounds and how their hitherto-unknown forebears' experiences shaped their lives and careers, the format was quickly adapted for other national audiences with nearly 20 versions around the world. This article examines the phenomenon of mediated genealogical research through the twinned prisms of race and postcolonialism. Employing close readings of episodes from the American (Emmitt Smith) and South African (Jabulani Tsambo/HHP) adaptations, as well as the original British series (Naomie Harris), this intervention interrogates the ways in which power and privilege in white settler colonies are unpacked through carefully-curated spatial narrations of private pasts meant for popular consumption. Using approaches drawn from more-than-representational geography, I view these seemingly 'individual' performances of genealogy as instead affect-inducing 'collective' journeys to sites of pain, prejudice, and power(lessness), which in turn serve to shape transnational perceptions of place and space.
Taking in over $1 billion in ticket sales in its first month, the Marvel Studios film Black Panther (2018) represents a watershed in popular-geopolitical representation of Africa, particularly though ...its inversion of centuries of depictions of Africa as a ‘Dark Continent’ where primitivism reigns. The motion picture also makes a discursive intervention in the politics of African American-African relations through spatial representation of three geographic constructs presented in the film: 1) the ‘real’ city of Oakland, California; 2) the fictional African kingdom of Wakanda; and 3) the (geo)political imaginary of the black world. This article demonstrates the (limited) scope and scale of popular geopolitics as resistance, elaborating on how cultural producers as well as scholars, critics and prosumers can shift the discourse by reframing and reinterpreting geopolitics via progressive pop-culture. However, is also contests the liberatory frame that characterised the film's reception; this is done through an interrogation of ‘Hollywood's’ appropriation of human suffering for financial profit, with a close attention to how Black Panther promotes a neoliberal agenda while also engaging in various forms Orientalism and Othering. Lastly, this article serves as an empirical contribution with its analysis of the representations of Black Panther's political geographies, focusing on how this artefact intersects with ongoing transnational political movements including Black Lives Matter.
Margaret Thatcher was one of the most controversial figures of modern times. Her governments inspired hatred and veneration in equal measure and her legacy remains fiercely contested. Yet assessments ...of the Thatcher era are often divorced from any larger historical perspective. This book draws together leading historians to locate Thatcher and Thatcherism within the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Britain. It explores the social and economic crises of the 1970s; Britain's relationships with Europe, the Commonwealth and the United States; and the different experiences of Thatcherism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The book assesses the impact of the Thatcher era on class and gender and situates Thatcherism within the Cold War, the end of Empire and the rise of an Anglo-American 'New Right'. Drawing on the latest available sources, it opens a wide-ranging debate about the Thatcher era and its place in modern British history.
Drawing on analytic frameworks from feminist IR's interrogation of fear in geopolitics and approaches rooted in the popular culture-world politics (PCWP) continuum, this article examines the ways in ...which the television series Counterpart (STARZ, 2017-2019) presaged a world defined by a novel form of ideological xenophobia and apolitical anthropophobia at the global level. As a premier example of immersive geopolitical television, the series examines diplomacy, biopolitics, and everyday attitudes to international relations via a screened imaginary that very much resembles our so-called 'real world' in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, while also auguring the likely reality to come. As I argue, our 'new normal' parallels many of the 'other-worldly' geopolitical codes and visions presented in Counterpart, thus explaining renewed interest in the series since early 2020. Focusing on the policing of bodies and borders in the time of COVID-19, I examine the series' discursive and visual world-building against various 'real-world' governmental and societal responses to the 'virus'. This is done through the lens of a new, global geopolitical thinking that is founded in the fear of (other) humans who are/might be (un)knowing carriers of the virus. Using Counterpart as a tool to think with, I attempt to bind geopolitics - an imagined/imaginary system of power relations based on limits and control - to anxieties triggered by the wide-ranging and uncontrollable flows of the novel coronavirus.
Geographers have long been interested in popular culture, exploring everything from music and film, to fashion and sport. However, there remain some gaps in the field with some of the biggest and ...most widely consumed genres of popular culture suffering from neglect. Given the pace of technological change, geographers have been noticeably slow to come to grips with new digital popular media. This special issue presents work that interrogates popular culture ranging from the new to the old for its role as a vector for, or entry point into, encounters with places and people, and as a producer of spatiality and social relations. This editorial uses the concept of (em)placement to identify the complex overlaps, imbrications, and interlockings between social, cultural, and technological actors/actants. (Em)placement is also deployed to expand the space for popular culture as an object of study in geography in order to foster more diverse engagements, and the freedom to engage, with popular culture in the discipline. In doing so, we highlight contributions to cultural geography, bringing into focus the ways in which popular culture has been redefined in a time of heightened digital and deterritorialized engagement alongside restrictions on physical interaction enforced during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Finally, the editorial introduces the seven papers in this special issue, drawing attention to workaday and active engagements with popular culture, and how such engagement can facilitate encounters as
This article interrogates the geopolitical content of the internationally popular television series Bron/Broen ('The Bridge') and its two subsequent adaptations. In my analysis of The Bridge as a ...global phenomenon, I make a threefold contribution to the literature of popular geopolitics and cultural geography. First, in a normative contribution intended to challenge mainstream assumptions regarding the banality of the medium of television, I situate TV-viewing within the discursive battlefield of global politics as an affective act of world-building, a phenomenon enabled by the emergence of a third phase of television (Television 3.0). Second, via a theoretical contribution, I conceive of Bridge-gazing as a form of quotidian geopolitical interaction, wherein the spectator maps their own emplacement in the world's various (b)order regimes, while also engaging with the distant politics of the series' narratives. And, third, in an empirical contribution, I provide a exegetic analysis of the three iterations of The Bridge by interrogating the three series' geopolitical interventions into pressing issues associated with unfettered globalisation, the purported victory of neoliberalism and the waning of the nation-state.
Daniel Drezner recently stated: 'We live in a Golden Age of international relations programming on television'; however, while geopolitical television dramas have flourished since the new millennium, ...IR scholars and political geographers have paid relatively little attention, instead focusing more attention on films. Given the capacity of television series to respond to headlines from around the world, as well as cater to audience tastes, the medium provides a substantively different platform for engaging and interrogating world affairs and negotiating geopolitical realities. In this article, I will discuss the emergence of the so-called geopolitical TV or small screen IR, and examine how technological advances and social transformations have created conditions for increasingly sophisticated offerings that interrogate a wide variety of issues in world politics. Addressing the shift towards more intellectually demanding fare since 2001, I provide a brief overview of the evolution of geopolitical TV since 2001, focusing initially on American dramas such as Lost, The Wire and 24, before moving on to more recent examples of geopolitically inflected programming which include case studies from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the US. In its empirical and structural contributions, this article provides a tentative typology of the genre, classifying geopolitical television series into five distinct groups with a representative empirical case study for each: 1) exotic-irrealist (Berlin Station); 2) parliamentary-domestic (Borgen); 3) procedural-localised (The Bridge); 4) historical-revisionist (Deutschland 83); and 5) speculative-fantastical (Occupied). In its normative and theoretical contributions, this article seeks to advance the study of small screen geopolitical interventions, arguing that geopolitical television series function both as a mirror/reflection of IR and an imaginative/predictive force in contemporary world politics.
