Politics and Film: Escapism or Education?

Traditionally, there has been skepticism among academics outside of the arts sciences and media sciences to incorporate artefacts from popular culture into their courses, or research. They might not only considered to be irrelevant, but also destructive for intellectual capacities (Postman, 2006). As educators, should we then be worried about students being great consumers of popular culture, and at least keep it out of the classroom? Should we at least stick to the ideals of documentaries aiming to “educate”, rather than profiting by selling “escapism” (Nichols, 1991)? Drawing on a previous project on media pedagogy (Kalnes, 2015), besides work by others (Dodds, 2008; Engert & Spencer, 2009; Gianos, 1999; Giglio, 2010; Gregg, 1998; Munster & Sylvest, 2015; Sealey, 2008; Swimelar, 2012; Webber, 2005; Weber, 2014; Weldes, 2003), this paper discusses how popular cultural media texts from television and film can indeed be applied in teaching political science. While the examples used mostly relate to international relations, the discussion considering the potential and limitations of such texts is applicable to a wider set of social sciences. It is argued that the use of media texts from popular culture is relevant at two levels. Politics are in various ways (Haas, Christensen, & Haas, 2015) embedded in texts students already know well, or are likely to take take an interest in, qua entertainment. Students can learn to discover and interprete the political narratives more or less hidden in popular media texts, as well their relation with audiences and society. Furthermore, these types of texts can be used as tools to illustrate and/or stimulate interest in apparaently abstract theories and concepts. The paper therefore suggests a double approach, not only teaching politics through popular culture, but also teaching about politics embedded within media texts. Even the most apparently unrealistic artefacts of popular culture, consisting of pure fiction and otsensibly made for pure entertainment, may be perfectly suitable as pedadogical tools. An analysis of how film and TV series have been used to explore and teach the field of international relations indicates that the span of media texts is surprisingly large, and used by a wide and growing range of academics (Harry Potter (Nexon & Neumann, 2006), Battlestar Galactica (Buzan, 2010; Kiersey & Neumann, 2013) and even zombie movies (Drezner, 2011). To sort the different possible teaching purposes of film and TV series I introduce four categories of teaching purposes, derived from Engert and Spencer (Engert & Spencer, 2009). There is a main distinction between using them as "a window to the world", regarding events and themes (positivism) and to learn about the importance of different cultural or theoretical perspectives on the world (post-positivism). The paper then discusses in depth four cases used in my own teaching that fits into these four categories: The Norwegian documentary My Daughter the Terrorist (Arnestad, 2007), the German satire Er ist Wieder da (Wnendt, 2015), a Turkish war film Valley of the Wolves – Iraq (Akar, 2006), and the American fantasy TV-series Game of Thrones (Benioff & Weiss, 2011).