With its focus on the popular television genre of Nordic noir, this book examines subtle and explicit manifestations of geopolitics in crime series from Scandinavia and Finland, as well as the impact of such programmes on how northern Europe is viewed around the world. Drawing on a diverse set of literature, from screen studies to critical International Relations, Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir addresses the fraught geopolitical content of Nordic television series, as well as how Nordic noir as a genre travels the globe. With empirical chapters focusing on the interlinked concepts of the body, the border, and the nation-state, this book interrogates the various ways in which northern European states grapple with challenges wrought by globalisation, neoliberalism, and climate change. Reflecting the current global fascination with all things Nordic, this text examines the light and dark sides of the region as seen through the television screen, demonstrating that series such as Occupied, Trapped, and The Bridge have much to teach us about world politics. This book will be of interest to those interested in geopolitics, national identity, and the politics of popular culture in: Scandinavian studies, media/screen studies, IR/political science, human/cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and communication.

This book is a comprehensive study of peripheral locations in contemporary European TV crime series. Ambitiously, it covers the complete geography of Europe, and offers a nuanced image of a changing, dynamic, and unfinished continent. The chapters include analyses of the practical, creative approach to producing crime series in European peripheries and rural areas, evaluating a continent marked by an internal crisis between urban and rural Europe. The study includes readings of crime series such as Shetland, Bitter Daisies, Trom, Pagan Peak, and The Border, but presents such representative cases within broader tendencies on the European TV market, including challenges from streaming services, the influence of Nordic Noir, and changes within the cognitive geography of Europe. The authors position peripheral European crime series in a complex relationship between universal appeal and local recognisability and offer a comprehensive theoretical approach to the aesthetics of peripherality. Grounded in desktop production studies, the book presents an original scholarly approach to analysing European crime series from a continental point of view. Despite local differences, the spatio-generic orientations scrutinized in the book – Nordic Noir, Mediterranean Noir, Country Noir, Eastern Noir, and Brit Noir – show remarkable aesthetic similarities in series from territories otherwise normally unconnected in television production. Consequently, television crime series reveal a common tongue and voice for dialogue on a continent in a deepening crisis.

This book represents the first extended consideration of contemporary crime fiction as a European phenomenon. Understanding crime fiction in its broadest sense, as a transmedia practice, and offering unique insights into this practice in specific European countries and as a genuinely transcontinental endeavour, this book argues that the distinctiveness of the form can be found in its related historical and political inquiries. It asks how the genre’s excavation of Europe’s history of violence and protest in the twentieth century is informed by contemporary political questions. It also considers how the genre’s progressive reimagining of new identities forged at the crossroads of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality is offset by its bleaker assessment of the corrosive effects of entrenched social inequalities, political corruption, and state violence. The result is a rich, vibrant collection that shows how crime fiction can help us better understand the complex relationship between Europe’s past, present, and future. Seven chapters are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Privileging the visual as the main method of communication and meaning-making, this book responds critically to the worldwide discussion about the Arctic and the North, addressing the interrelated issues of climate change, ethics and geopolitics. A multi-disciplinary, multi-modal exploration of the Arctic, it supplies an original conceptualization of the Arctic as a visual world encompassing an array of representations, imaginings, and constructions. By examining a broad range of visual forms, media and forms such as art, film, graphic novels, maps, media, and photography, the book advances current debates about visual culture. The book enriches contemporary theories of the visual taking the Arctic as a spatial entity and also as a mode of exploring contemporary and historical visual practices, including imaginary constructions of the North. Original contributions include case studies from all the countries along the Arctic shore, with Russian material occupying a large section due to the country’s impact on the region

Beer Places is, most essentially, a road map for craft beer, taking readers to various locales to discover the beverage’s deep connections to place. At another level, Beer Places is an academic analysis of these geographical ties. Collected into sections that address authenticity and revitalization, politics and economics, and collectivity and collaboration, this book blends new research with a series of “postcards”: informal conversations and first-person dispatches from the field that transport readers to the spots where pints are shared, networks forged, and spaces defined. With insight from social scientists, beer bloggers, travel writers, and food entrepreneurs who recount their experiences of taprooms, breweries, and bottle shops from North Carolina to Zimbabwe, Beer Places reveals differences in the craft beer scene across multiple geographies. Situating craft beer as an emerging and important component of food studies, the essays in this volume attest to the singular power of craft beer to connect people and places.

Popular Culture, Social Media, and the Politics of Identity advances a novel methodological approach – pop culture as political object – to capture the centrality of popular culture as an object of a broad range of political contests and debates that constitute pop culture artefacts by generating and informing specific meanings and understandings of them. It is no longer novel to claim that popular culture matters to world politics. The literature on Popular Culture and World Politics (PCWP) has demonstrated the cultural basis of political action and meaning-making. However, this book argues that in doing so, the PCWP literature has focused primarily on the traditionally narrow range of issues, actors, and things that mainstream International Relations regards as part of world politics. While PCWP challenges restrictive disciplinary understandings of the sites of legitimate inquiry where one can purposefully gain knowledge about world politics, comparatively little has been done to challenge constricted understandings of what world politics is, who it involves, and where it takes place. Methodological approaches in the literature largely treat popular culture and politics as separate and therefore focus on understanding how popular culture relates to and intersects with a relatively circumscribed notion of world politics. Focusing on the everyday politics of how audiences perceive and contest popular cultural artefacts, this book demonstrates that pop culture does not merely intersect with or reflect discrete political processes; it is also directly situated as an object of politics. The author analyses current debates over identity politics across a range of contemporary pop cultural artefacts, including films and video games. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of International Relations, Political Science, and Cultural and Media Studies.

Politicised Cinema demonstrates how taking a collection of seemingly apolitical films and using them as an instrument for serving explicit political aims can be used as a force for good. Through an analysis of Orient: A Survey of Films Produced in Countries of Arab and Asian Culture, a film catalogue published by UNESCO and the BFI in 1959 to promote intercultural understanding between the East and the West, this book argues for the importance of studying the ways the interpretation of films can be guided to serve a specific political agenda, even when the films themselves were originally produced with very different aims in mind. The author focuses on how the catalogue positions culture and its cinematic representations as a marker of difference between the Eastern and Western worlds, and shows that even major cultural conflicts such as the Cold War and the decolonisation process can be reframed in service of UNESCO’s cultural diplomatic agenda. The book explores the ways in which the catalogue of Eastern films deemed suitable for Western audiences became a weapon to fight against prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry in a politicised battle over dismantling the proclaimed link between difference and conflict. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and academics in visual politics, cinematic international relations, cultural diplomacy, global governance, and international cultural politics, as well as film studies, Asian studies, and cultural studies. In addition, policymakers and practitioners in the fields of cultural diplomacy and cultural policy will find the empirical case study to be of use in practical work.

The imaginaries of northern landscape have not remained static in the era of ecological crisis but play a pivotal function within the geopolitics of visual representation. Such imaginaries can sanction those dominant discourses that frame environmental catastrophe as the consequence of undifferentiated human activity, but, it is argued, they also have the capacity to represent a complexity and heterogeneity frequently absent from this broad discursive field. The contributors to this volume engage with the practice, curation and utilization of photography and other lens-based media, to examine the critical role of visual culture in shaping and interrogating conceptions of environmental catastrophe.

Focusing on contemporary crime narratives from different parts of the world, this collection of essays explores the mobility of crimes, criminals and investigators across social, cultural and national borders. The essays argue that such border crossings reflect on recent sociocultural transformations and geopolitical anxieties to create an image of networked and interconnected societies where crime is not easily contained. The book further analyses crime texts’ wider sociocultural and affective significance by examining the global mobility of the genre itself across cultures, languages and media. Underlining the global reach and mobility of the crime genre, the collection analyses types and representations of mobility in literary and visual crime narratives, inviting comparisons between texts, crimes and mobilities in a geographically diverse context. The collection ultimately understands mobility as an object of study and a critical lens through which transformations in our globalised world can be examined.

Addressing representations of Russia and neighbouring Eastern Europe in post-1989 Nordic cinemas, this ground-breaking book investigates their hitherto overlooked transnational dimension.