Symposium: Popular Culture Matters

[This is a post-publication review symposium] In an era of ‘post-truth’ politics, where reports of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ dominate the mass media, it is fitting that we should pay more attention to the role of fictional narratives in world politics. After all, if ‘facts’ and ‘news’ of choice can be disseminated with increasing ease by whichever regime is in power, and if aspects of the ‘public sphere’ are cultivated by corporations in ways that deliberately produce manipulative, distracting echo chambers, then it seems imperative for all scholars to have a handle on the relationship between politics, narration, truth and fiction.We are therefore pleased to present an ISQ Online symposium on Daniel and Musgrave’s 2017 article ‘Synthetic Experiences: How Popular Culture Matters for Images of International Relations’. The authors argue in this article that fictional narratives within popular culture can have a significant influence on elite and mass audiences through forms of cognitive interaction between fictional narratives and others. The piece explores this through the frame of ‘synthetic experiences’, suggesting that fiction may be frequently synthesised into cognition of particular situations, and thus play similar roles to academic knowledge in terms of helping policymakers interpret situations and courses of action. This is illustrated through an examination of the effect of Tom Clancy novels on the Reagan- Bush era foreign policy establishment. [...]