Jason Dittmer
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 171337 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Jason Dittmer |
| PRENOMES | Jason |
| SOBRENOME | Dittmer |
| ASSINATURA | DITTMER J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1022-4978 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 73 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 1090 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 71 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 16 |
A land between solid and fluid
This article aims to situate permafrost, a type of soil characterized by temperature and relationality rather than pure composition, within debates around the role of materiality in geopolitics. While permafrost's materiality is quite like ice, it differs in terms of having a more complex and non-linear relationship to temperature and a higher level of local variability. Because permafrost has only very rarely been considered in debates around te…
Towards a greener shade of Khaki? Boundary work between the German Green party and the Bundeswehr
This article investigates the perspectives of people working at the intersection of Green politics and the military in Germany, a country currently redefining its approach to security policy as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It takes as a starting point the tension between the conventional security paradigm, i.e. the idea that security is something militaries provide for the nation-state, and the need to mitigate the environmental a…
Valuing the subterranean
This article argues that value can be a key concept for bridging between geopolitics and economic geography, providing a historicised account of a subterranean geopolitical space as it shifts from a valuation regime focused on strategic use value to one focused on commercial exchange value. This argument is pursued through an empirical investigation of the tunnel system within the Rock of Gibraltar, tracing how they have been valued differently i…
Geography, the Media, and Popular Culture 40 years on
This reflection reviews the shifting landscape of both popular culture studies and Cultural Geography from the publication of Geography, the Media, and Popular Culture to today. The achievement of the volume is celebrated, even as it notes that those achievements were a starting point for innovation rather than a revolution in themselves
More-than-Human Space Diplomacy
This article explores the role of materiality in space diplomacy through the example of orbital docking technology by tracing its evolution from the early days of the space age to the International Space Station — and beyond. Drawing on the use of assemblage theory in political geography, this article argues for a ‘more-than-human’ approach to space diplomacy to supplement and provide an alternative to conventional approaches to diplomacy studies…
The Geopolitics of Tourism in the Indo-Pacific
This introduction to the special section focuses on the geopolitical relevance of tourism in the Indo-Pacific region. We first review the literature on everyday geopolitics, or Popular Geopolitics 2.0, elaborating the trend of attention to tourism activities in political geography. We then turn to tourism studies and find the divergence and convergence between these literatures. Finally, we argue that a focus on the Indo-Pacific offers new points…
The Figure of the Refugee in Superhero Cinema
In this paper we argue that superhero cinema offers an opportunity to think through the narratives and affects of the refugee crisis, which are distinct from, but related to, the relatively well-attended-to tropes of journalism. To do so we adopt both the ethical stance of feminist political geography and the analytic methods of popular geopolitics. Our analysis focuses on two films from the burgeoning Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU): Thor: Ragna…
Food sovereignty and property in Cuba and the United States
Food sovereignty promotes agroecological farming methods and the reduction of food insecurity through changing political relations between people, land and food policy. Market orientations to land and private property in liberal democracies restrict access to food, and thus for food sovereigntists, reframing the social relationship to land through property is key to making food more available. This paper examines the case of usufruct land rights …
The state of this
Putting geopolitics in its place
From Death in the Ice to life in the museum
Ever since its disappearance in the mid-19th-century, the fate of the 'Franklin expedition' has attracted interest and intrigue. The story has been told and re-told but remained one of 'mystery' into the early 21st-century. When the expedition's two ships were finally located, the narrative shifted with the reappearance of long-absent objects and materials - in turn, posing challenges for museum curators seeking to re-present the story. In this a…
Thinking with Diplomacy
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
Assemblage and the changing geographies of the state
This chapter introduces the conceptual potential of assemblage thinking with regard to the state. It begins by reviewing recent moves in the geographies of the state to shift from a narrative/discourse of the state to an ‘everyday state’ that emphasizes the performance of individuals located within it. Assemblage offers the chance to inject a greater emphasis on materiality and the agency of objects in our understanding of state power and state p…
The force of events
This paper highlights both an overreliance on legal perspectives in the study of paradiplomacy at the expense of more dynamic understandings of agency, and also the affective force of waiting and other temporal states on political subject formation. Empirically, it reports the results of a longitudinal study on Gibraltarians’ concerns over the Gibraltar–Spain frontier. By comparing data from two identical surveys conducted a year apart during the…
Subjectivity and the sensing of geopolitics
Organic certification as assemblage
Through the lens of assemblage theory, we conceptualise organic certification for agricultural products in Cuba as a “dispositif‐assemblage,” through which we trace a multiple and conflicted “will to govern” the production and valuing of food qualities. We juxtapose the hierarchical third‐party certification system for Cuban organic honey for export with a proposed horizontal participatory guarantee system for organic products to be consumed in C…
Distributed Agency
This short provocation argues for a diplomacy studies that is less focused on the rationality of states, with the ministry of foreign affairs ( MFA ) as an imagined black box in which calculation occurs, and more on the idea of ‘external’ agency as the emergent effect from a range of elements within and without the state. To illustrate this idea, the essay sketches out an example of foreign policy made in the absence of an MFA entirely: Gibraltar…
Gibraltarians’ attitudes towards Brexit and the Gibraltar-Spain frontier
This paper theorizes the border as imbricated in everyday life, especially in a small territory such as Gibraltar. We document the results of a 2018 survey of Gibraltarians’ attitudes toward the frontier between the 2016 Brexit referendum and the planned departure of the UK from the EU in 2019. We argue that virtually all respondents felt that a change in the border regime would affect community cohesion and identity. Second, we argue that genera…
You'll go home with bruises”
What happens when a naval vessel (in this case, HMS Belfast ) is converted into a floating museum? This paper approaches this question with the concepts of assemblage and more‐than‐representational thought, in which the materialisation of the past is generative of a range of potentials that can shape encounters in the present. HMS Belfast is dedicated to conveying the specific history of the ship, as well as to providing a sense of what life on b…
The origins and evolution of popular geopolitics
When I was a PhD student (1999–2003) studying newspaper representations of Central and Eastern Europe during NATO and EU expansion, Klaus Dodds’s and Jo Sharp’s work was central to the way in which I came to position my work within wider literatures. More importantly, however, when I subsequently decided to shift from ‘legitimate’ news media to the decidedly more vulgar study of superheroes and their imbrication in geopolitical discourse, it was …
The state, all at sea
The sea has long been envisioned as antithetical to land, and therefore geography and the state. The Global Network of Navies is a Pentagon-led program that seeks to extend state power over the seas by cultivating naval interoperability. Interoperability has been a source of American military might since Second World War, but took on heightened importance after the Cold War. In this paper, I make three related arguments. First, I argue that the G…
What Khan a feminist geopolitics do
Reassessing the Trump presidency, one year on
Liminality and the diplomacy of the British Overseas Territories
This paper examines diplomatic processes that compose our geopolitical world as dynamic and yet also seemingly affirm the status quo. It turns attention to the entrepreneurial creativity of individual diplomats, the transformations occurring at threshold moments, spaces and practices, and the materiality of diplomacy that exceeds human agency. The paper does so by forging an innovative dialogue between assemblage theory and the notion of liminali…
Liquid landscape
Liquid landscape: geography and settlement at the edge of Early America." Social & Cultural Geography, 19(6), pp. 831–832
Geopolitical assemblages and complexity
This article proposes a framework for considering materiality in the field of geopolitics: assemblage and complexity theories. Drawing on literatures beyond the field to imagine a posthuman geopolitics, this article argues for a relational ontology that emphasizes the complex interactions among the elements of an assemblage. These interactions produce emergent effects which themselves reshape the assemblage's elements. This has implications for u…
Popular Geopolitics Past and Future
This short and hopefully provocative paper serves as both a retrospective of the past twenty years of critical work on so-called popular geopolitics and also an impetus for a more theoretical connection to related areas within cultural studies, such as fan studies. An overarching theme of the history of popular geopolitics has been a concern over geopolitical representation and discourse, which is only now beginning to shift towards audience inte…
Mimicking state diplomacy
Diplomacy and recognition play central roles in the conventional conferral of state legitimacy and functioning of the inter-state system. In broadening the diplomatic frame by stepping outside the conventional state-system, this paper brings a poststructuralist and performative toolkit to mimetic diplomatic practices. Adapting Bhabha’s notion of mimicry to diplomatic discourse, it demonstrates how non-state diplomacies draw on, mimic and interven…
The museum as assemblage
This article takes as its focus the Australian War Memorial, including its collections, the physical infrastructure of the site, its staff and the range of people who encounter it as tourists, researchers or military personnel and their families. In taking up this interest, our intention is not to diminish, ignore or bypass the role of narrative and representation in their spaces. Rather, we aim to contribute to a more-than-representational appre…
Captain America's Empire
This article introduces comic books as a medium through which national identity and geopolitical scripts are narrated. This extension of the popular geopolitics literature uses the example of post-11 September 2001 (“9/11”) Captain America comic books to integrate various strands of theory from political geography and the study of nationalism to break new ground in the study of popular culture, identity, and geopolitics. The article begins with a…
Liminality and the diplomacy of the British Overseas Territories
This paper examines diplomatic processes that compose our geopolitical world as dynamic and yet also seemingly affirm the status quo. It turns attention to the entrepreneurial creativity of individual diplomats, the transformations occurring at threshold moments, spaces and practices, and the materiality of diplomacy that exceeds human agency. The paper does so by forging an innovative dialogue between assemblage theory and the notion of liminali…
Mapping the political geographies of Europeanization
Political geographers have significantly contributed to understandings of the spatialities of Europeanization. We review some of this work, while also highlighting research themes where further political-geographic research would be insightful. We note the importance of work that captures both the diverse expressions and meanings attributed to Europe, European integration and ‘European power’ in different places within and beyond the EU, and the …
Have you heard the one about the disappearing ice? Recasting Arctic geopolitics
Humour at the Model United Nations
Model United Nations (MUN) is a simulation in which students take on the roles of ambassadors to the United Nations, engaging in debate on ‘real’ issues from the perspective of their assumed national identities. This paper, based on a year of ethnography and interviews of a college-level MUN team, examines the role of humour in producing particular geopolitical imaginations among those participating and also in producing the MUN assemblage itself…
Theorizing a More-than-Human Diplomacy
This article emphasizes the more-than-human nature of foreign policy formation and diplomatic practice, as found in an examination of nineteenth-century Parliament Select Committee testimony regarding the intersection of everyday bureaucratic practice and the material context of the British Foreign Office. These records indicate both how the changing world of diplomacy at this time (including new states and communication technologies) materially …
Comic book visualities
This paper deals with comic books as both a textual and visual form, arguing that the present literatures on the geographies of reading and visuality neglect this kind of hybrid. Comic book producers’ discursive construction of their audience is key to the way in which comic book visuality becomes a set of ‘conventions’ that are materialised through the printing process. These conventions are linked to cinematic visuality through their use of mon…
The Geopolitical Audience
This article argues for the intersection of popular geopolitics and audience studies in audience power. This is demonstrated through a survey of viewers attending the James Bond film Quantum of Solace (QoS) at three theatres in the greater London area. Geography emerged as relevant to audiences in three forms. First, geography was understood as a catalyst for resource-based wars, providing an opportunity to reflect on these conflicts and their fu…
Thinking with Diplomacy
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
Reassessing the Trump presidency, one year on
American Exceptionalism, Visual Effects, and the Post-9/11 Cinematic Superhero Boom
This paper argues that popular geopolitics needs to pay attention to the full range of the cultural economy in its analyses of popular culture artifacts. Previous work has been overfocused on the text without enough attention to production and audiencing, and as a result analyses often assume an ideological motivation to questions of genre and meaning. This paper uses as a case study the post-9/11 boom of the superhero genre in Hollywood cinema, …
The Ashgate research companion to media geography
© Paul C. Adams, Jim Craine and Jason Dittmer and the contributors 2014. All rights reserved. This Companion provides an authoritative source for scholars and students of the nascent field of media geography. While it has deep roots in the wider discipline, the consolidation of media geography has started only in the past decade, with the creation of media geography's first dedicated journal, Aether, as well as the publication of the sub-discipli…
The geographical pivot of (the end of) history
Interventions in banal neoimperialism
Captain Canuck , audience response, and the project of Canadian nationalism
This paper addresses the role of comic books in interpellating national identities, locating the process of national identity formation in the interplay between popular culture producers and their audiences as described by Althusser (Citation1977) and McGee (Citation1975). The empirical section of this paper focuses on Captain Canuck, a Canadian-produced comic book originating in the 1970s and sporadically published through the present day. The a…
The Tyranny of the Serial
This paper seeks to theorize the structuring of geopolitical worldviews and attitudes by the comic book medium and by serial popular culture more broadly. Evidence of the use of comic books to promote specific discourses by geopolitical actors is presented, and the conventions that govern the limits of comic book narration are outlined. Among the conventions of production discussed are the role of “continuity” as a structuring force and the seria…
America is Safe While its Boys and Girls Believe in its Creeds
In this paper I engage with the literature on nationalism and popular culture to discuss the role of Captain America Comics in the production of American national identity and national interest prior to World War 2. The character of Captain America is introduced as an example of a rescaling icon, or a bridge between collective identity and the individual. Additionally, the impact of the context in which the comic was produced is discussed as a fo…
Assembling Political Parties
This paper argues for political geographers to reengage with party politics. We review the treatment of political parties in political geography and beyond, finding fault with the purported divide between society and political parties. In contrast, we argue that political parties are necessarily embroiled and enmeshed in and of society, and that assemblage and affect provide potentially vibrant ways to reengage with their importance and meaning. …
Colonialism and Place Creation in Mars Pathfinder Media Coverage
This paper addresses the representation of the planet Mars during the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission through a content analysis of major U.S. newspapers as well as transcripts of television and radio news shows. Content analysis identified three threads of representation: scientific advance and the search for life, the naming of Martian places, and the Earth analogy. Together these converge in a language of colonialism that both advances the econom…
Intervention
Everyday Diplomacy
This article offers an alternative to civilizational thinking in geopolitics and international relations predicated on assemblage theory. Building on literature in political geography and elsewhere about everyday practices that produce state effects, this article theorizes the existence of transnational geopolitical assemblages that incorporate foreign policy apparatuses of multiple states. Everyday material and discursive circulations make up th…
Florida's residual votes, voting technology, and the 2000 election
Captain America's Empire
This article introduces comic books as a medium through which national identity and geopolitical scripts are narrated. This extension of the popular geopolitics literature uses the example of post-11 September 2001 (“9/11”) Captain America comic books to integrate various strands of theory from political geography and the study of nationalism to break new ground in the study of popular culture, identity, and geopolitics. The article begins with a…
Nato, the EU and Central Europe
This essay investigates the contemporary evolution of the symbolic shape of Central Europe by conducting a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles from the Lexis–Nexis database covering NATO and EU expansion. The results of this content analysis show that Central Europe is associated with different symbolic shapes at different times and in different political contexts, and therefore the idea of one hegemonic Central Eu…
Global Geopolitics
Global Geopolitics
Teaching the Social Construction of Regions in Regional Geography Courses; or, Why Do Vampires Come from Eastern Europe
This article describes the difficulty of teaching about the construction of regions in regional geography courses, which are themselves built on a metageography that often goes unquestioned. The author advocates the use of popular culture to make this very complex issue palpable for undergraduates. Thus, the construction of Eastern Europe within a larger European framework is clear through a study of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the movies that the …
Changing American Metanarratives of Russia in Nato Expansion Debates, 1993–2002
This article seeks to discover the reflexive relationship between Russian national identity and NATO expansion debates. This is accomplished through a content analysis of American newspaper articles from 1993–2002. Three metanarratives of Russian national identity were discovered and charted over time. They are: Russia as Western, Russia as Oriental and Russia as Geopolitical Space. By charting these metanarratives over time, shifts in representa…
The Tyranny of the Serial
This paper seeks to theorize the structuring of geopolitical worldviews and attitudes by the comic book medium and by serial popular culture more broadly. Evidence of the use of comic books to promote specific discourses by geopolitical actors is presented, and the conventions that govern the limits of comic book narration are outlined. Among the conventions of production discussed are the role of “continuity” as a structuring force and the seria…
Colonialism and Place Creation in Mars Pathfinder Media Coverage
This paper addresses the representation of the planet Mars during the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission through a content analysis of major U.S. newspapers as well as transcripts of television and radio news shows. Content analysis identified three threads of representation: scientific advance and the search for life, the naming of Martian places, and the Earth analogy. Together these converge in a language of colonialism that both advances the econom…
Captain Canuck , audience response, and the project of Canadian nationalism
This paper addresses the role of comic books in interpellating national identities, locating the process of national identity formation in the interplay between popular culture producers and their audiences as described by Althusser (Citation1977) and McGee (Citation1975). The empirical section of this paper focuses on Captain Canuck, a Canadian-produced comic book originating in the 1970s and sporadically published through the present day. The a…
Intervention
America is Safe While its Boys and Girls Believe in its Creeds
In this paper I engage with the literature on nationalism and popular culture to discuss the role of Captain America Comics in the production of American national identity and national interest prior to World War 2. The character of Captain America is introduced as an example of a rescaling icon, or a bridge between collective identity and the individual. Additionally, the impact of the context in which the comic was produced is discussed as a fo…
Apocalypse, now? The geopolitics of Left Behind
The geographical pivot of (the end of) history
Interventions in banal neoimperialism
Popular Geopolitics Past and Future
This short and hopefully provocative paper serves as both a retrospective of the past twenty years of critical work on so-called popular geopolitics and also an impetus for a more theoretical connection to related areas within cultural studies, such as fan studies. An overarching theme of the history of popular geopolitics has been a concern over geopolitical representation and discourse, which is only now beginning to shift towards audience inte…
Popular Geopolitics 2.0
This paper argues for the renewal of popular geopolitics through the adoption of a research agenda that emphasizes everyday life. Popular geopolitics as commonly practiced has adopted a focus on textual deconstruction that neglects the practices and performances that mark much of the everyday experience of the geopolitical. This paper reviews the literature on feminist geopolitics, non‐representational theory, and audience studies to find points …
Comic book visualities
This paper deals with comic books as both a textual and visual form, arguing that the present literatures on the geographies of reading and visuality neglect this kind of hybrid. Comic book producers’ discursive construction of their audience is key to the way in which comic book visuality becomes a set of ‘conventions’ that are materialised through the printing process. These conventions are linked to cinematic visuality through their use of mon…
Mediating sovereignty
This article addresses the role of news media in mediating and legitimating sovereignty claims within the nation-state system. Given the performativity of sovereignty claims, the speech acts of political actors require mediation in order to achieve their intent. This mediation occurs through formal channels but requires dissemination via popular media to permeate the public consciousness. Journalistic practices play a key role in the degree to wh…
Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom
Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, by David Harvey, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. x+339 pp., US $27.50 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-231-14846-7 This book is based on David Harv
Have you heard the one about the disappearing ice? Recasting Arctic geopolitics
Emotional geographies
American Exceptionalism, Visual Effects, and the Post-9/11 Cinematic Superhero Boom
This paper argues that popular geopolitics needs to pay attention to the full range of the cultural economy in its analyses of popular culture artifacts. Previous work has been overfocused on the text without enough attention to production and audiencing, and as a result analyses often assume an ideological motivation to questions of genre and meaning. This paper uses as a case study the post-9/11 boom of the superhero genre in Hollywood cinema, …
Captain Britain And The Narration Of Nation
Captain Britain Weekly (1976–1977) was the first comic book specially created for the British market by New York‐based Marvel Comics. The title character was created as an analogue to Captain America, the legendary American nationalist hero of the so‐named comic book, but with key differences meant to resonate in the British context. I utilize visual and textual discourse analysis to study the narrative and imagery used to introduce this characte…
Mighty morphin’ power networks
Political science (59 obras) · Sociology (57 obras) · Politics (52 obras) · Law (48 obras) · Aesthetics (30 obras) · Geopolitics (29 obras) · Law (29 obras) · Art (26 obras) · Geography (21 obras) · Media studies (21 obras)