Overview
- Uses Harry Potter and the Hunger Games to illuminate IR and peace and conflict issues
- Combines pop culture, politics and peacebuilding
- Offers a new framework for thinking about global youth activism and peace
Part of the book series: Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies (RCS)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Theoretical and Historical Foundations
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Front Matter
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Reading Peace: Textual and Intertextual Analysis
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Front Matter
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From ‘Tabloid’ Culture to Fan Culture: Consumable Peace?
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book offers a rationale for and ways of reading popular culture for peace. It argues that we can improve peacebuilding theory and practice through examining popular culture’s youth revolutionaries and their outcomes - from their digital and plastic renderings to their living embodiments in local struggles for justice. The study combines insights from post-structural, post-colonial, feminist, youth studies and peace and conflict studies theories to analyze the literary themes, political uses, and cultural impacts of two hit book series – Harry Potter and The Hunger Games – tracing how these works have been transformed into visible political practices, including social justice advocacy and government propaganda in the War on Terror. Pop culture production and consumption help maintain global hierarchies of inequality and structural violence but can also connect people across divisions through fandom participation. Including chapters on fan activism, fan fiction, Guantanamo Bay detention center, youth as a discursive construct in IR, and the merchandizing and tourism opportunities connected with The Hunger Games, the book argues that through taking youth-oriented pop culture seriously, we can better understand the local, global and transnational spaces, discourses, and the relations of power, within which meanings and practices of peace are known, negotiated, encoded and obstructed.
Reviews
“Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures sums up a lifetime of work by McEvoy-Levy, illustrating the importance of engaging youth in post-conflict peace processes, as well as considering how children and youth put forward different ideas of peace. … This is a worthy project, supported by her accounts in important ways.” (Kate Macfarlane, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, August 30, 2020)
“Siobhan McEvoy-Levy’s Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures is the most compelling contribution to peace and conflict studies I’ve seen in decades. Combining conceptual innovation, sophisticated textual analysis, extraordinary issue-awareness, and a nuanced appreciation of popular culture, the book is a must read not only for those interested in peace and conflict but also for those who follow diverse genres of popular culture as well.” (Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i, Manoa)“Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures is the right book for the right time. As evidenced by the votes for Brexit and Trump, a generation gap is opening up between the political views of young people and their elders the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1960s. Dr. McEvoy-Levy sets her sights on the popular culture that provides the language for this difference, helping us to understand the popular geopolitics of young adult fiction and the ways in which it has filtered out of the text and into spaces of social media and protest.” (Dr Jason Dittmer, Professor of Political Geography, University College London)
“In this fantastic and necessary study, McEvoy-Levy reveals how crucial popular culture is to the making, sustaining, understanding, challenging, and possibly undoing of dominant discourses and practices of peace in domestic and global politics. Combining clear insights about cutting-edge theoretical analyses from Foucault, Agamben, or Anzaldua with detailed, astute, and fun readings of young adult popular cultural productions such as the Harry Potter and Hunger Games texts and films, this volume meticulously examines how narratives about the possibility of peace (and the social identities they mobilize) are enabled, produced, distributed, undermined, or rejected through the work of popular cultural fictions. For anyone interested in understanding how peacebuilding is made on a daily basis through interactions individuals have with everyday culture, Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures is a must-read.” (François Debrix, Professor of Political Science and ASPECT Director, Virginia Tech)
“Popular culture frames how politics is seen, sensed and carried out. In this fascinating and comprehensive book, Siobhán McEvoy-Levy shows how young adult literature has the potential to identify and resist discourses of war and militarization. By visualizing alternative and more just political worlds, youth culture can play an important role in conflict resolution and peacebuilding.” (Roland Bleiker, Professor, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Australia)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Peace and Resistance in Youth Cultures
Book Subtitle: Reading the Politics of Peacebuilding from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games
Authors: Siobhan McEvoy-Levy
Series Title: Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49871-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-49870-0Published: 22 January 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-49871-7Published: 21 December 2017
Series ISSN: 1759-3735
Series E-ISSN: 2752-857X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 422
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations
Topics: Conflict Studies, Youth Culture