Descending from the heights

Conducting research on something as, well, popular as pirates makes you somewhat inclined to go on the defensive as to the seriousness of your research and its importance to the study of "actual" international relations. So this concluding passage from Jutta Weldes' fascinating Constructing National Interests:The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis provided some welcome theoretical validation for what we're up to this summer:

Recognizing the constitutive character of common sense, in turn, opens up a variety of other possible domains of inquiry that have often been overlooked in our attempts better to understand world politics. One such domain, I would argue, is popular culture. Students of international relations have rarely descended from the heights of interstate interaction to analyze the everyday cultural conditions that make particular state actions possible and that render them sensible to wider publics. But as I have suggested, these mundane cultural conditions are integral to rather than irrelevant for state action. It matters deeply that U.S. state actors are able to interpret and to define world politics in ways that at least significant portions of the U.S. population, and other audiences, find plausible and persuasive. The reproduction of common sense, and specifically of the grounds upon which particular representations are constructed and make sense, however, cannot be restricted to the representational practices of state actors. On the contrary, those representations are made sensible in no small part precisely because they fit with the constructions of the world and its workings into which diverse populations are hailed in their everyday lives. Representing world politics is not an unusual or extraordinary activity; rather, it is a relentlessly mundane and commonplace one. A key site at which that representation takes place, then, is in popular culture, in the everyday practices of meaning making that structure the quotidien. Perhaps it is time we devoted a little less attention to the doings of state actors and instead devoted a little more to the “silent” masses in whose name they claim to speak. (241-242)

In Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, P.W. Singer has a similar, though (necessarily?) somewhat less academic, justification for the importance of popular culture as a site of research:

[T]his is how people process information most efficiently. Humankind has long best understood and digested things that new by flavoring them with stories of personal experience ("There was this one time, in band camp, where we...") as well as by allusions to what is already culturally familiar, especially icons, symbols, and metaphors ("It's just like when..."). And, whether we like it or not, our twenty-first century folklore is that of the popular movies, TV shows, music, gadgets, and books that shaped us growing up. (15)