Media, culture and popular geopolitics: how imagined spaces and identities are forged

The article discusses the origins, the state-of-the-art and prospects of the new research field within critical geopolitics - popular geopolitics. The article aims to summarize the basic premises of popular geopolitics and demonstrate its relevance for analyzing, predicting and modeling modern geopolitical processes. Popular geopolitics focuses on geopolitical narratives that are translated through mediated images and objectified through mass culture products. It is precisely through popular culture, in particular through pop culture narratives that cross-cultural communication of the globalization era occurs. As part of this process cultural differences are either perceived as markers of otherness or, on the contrary, enable the consumer/spectator to reconsider the “self-other” boundaries and let the culturally attractive “others” in. As for geopolitical narratives, they introduce a clear demarcation between “self” and “others” by assigning to them opposite developmental trajectories that symbolize progress or backwardness, rise or decline, expansion or isolation. The authors of the article argue that a transmedia approach could make a valuable contribution to popular geopolitics. On the one hand, it enables exploring the totality of meanings forged and transmitted over social and online media through visual and virtual communication channels. In addition, the analysis of transmedia storytelling allows us to investigate in depth the role of content creators and content consumers in the production of narratives as well as investigate different ways in which official geopolitical narratives can be perceived by both domestic and external audiences. It is also argued that employing mixed methodology that combines qualitative and automated quantitative methods of textual and audiovisual data collection and analysis can help realize the interdisciplinarity of popular geopolitics. Thus, the authors come to the conclusion that popular geopolitics as a research field is relevant in terms of updating the research agenda of political science as a whole. As for the practical relevance of popular geopolitics, it lies in the active reconstruction of social reality that enables the representatives of Russian practical geopolitics to forge more effectively the national “imagined world” capable of engaging in a dialogue and resisting transnational narratives.