Suspended in 2025/26
IR318      Half Unit
Visual International Politics

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

We live in a visual age. Images play an increasingly important role in shaping international political events and our understanding of them. The objective of this course is to examine how visual sources - maps, photographs, film, television, new media - influence international political phenomena, our perception of them, and public responses to them. The course has conceptual,  empirical, and practical objectives. At a conceptual level students will acquire knowledge of key theoretical and methodological debates necessary to study visual international politics. At an empirical level, students will gain a better understanding of several concrete instances where images helped to shape international political phenomena, from wars to humanitarian crises, from global social movements to alternative world orders. At a practical level, students will learn how to make a short documentary film.

This course is delivered through lectures and classes totalling a minimum of 20 hours across Autumn Term. Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay-diary and 1 project in the AT.

AT week 7: 750-word essay diary

AT week 8: Rough edit of film - approx. 2 minutes duration

Bleiker, Roland, ed. (2018) Visual Global Politics. London: Routledge.

Callahan, William A. (2020) Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harman, Sophie. (2019) Seeing Politics: Film, Visual Method, and International Relations. McGill-Queens University Press.

Rose, Gillian (2016) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 4th ed. London: Routledge.

Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin.

Evans, Jessica and Stuart Hall, eds. (1999) Visual Culture: The Reader. London: Sage.

Mirzoeff, Nicolas (2015) How to See the World. London: Pelican Books.

Shapiro, Michael J. (2011) Cinematic Geopolitics. London: Routledge.

Project (50%)

Essay (50%, 2500 words)

The project will be a 5-minute documentary film, which will be made by teams of 3 students.