Recent scholarship in International Relations (IR) and International Political Sociology (IPS) has made significant contributions to the study of images. Chief among such studies on visual politics has been the focus on popular visual media including cartoons, film, photography and video games. This paper takes a look at another prominent medium: the comic. Comics provide ample potential starting points for IR scholars and political sociologists: the comic’s aesthetic qualities, that is the way in which it narrates geopolitical events to public audiences through condensed image–word relations, reveals a distinct politics of representation. Thus, the study of comics contributes to a better understanding of visuality—theoretically, methodologically, and empirically. This paper complements existing work by engaging an example outside of familiar European-language contexts. It discusses a comic booklet that was published by the South Korean Ministry of National Defense in the aftermath of the sinking of the Cheonan: a navy vessel that was allegedly sunk by a North Korean torpedo in 2010. Recognizing comics as narrative sites of (geo)politics, the paper explores the booklet’s own way of seeing by discussing its dramatic structure and rhetorical devices. In this way the paper provides an exemplary reading of comics, which can serve as a conceptual basis for future studies in the field.

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Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

Sketching geopolitics: comics and the case of the Cheonan sinking

This essay in the field of rhetorical narratology theorizes three varieties of authors’ strategic empathizing, adding to the understanding of the relationship among idealized authorial audiences and actual, historic audiences made up of a variety of real readers. Keen suggests that authorial strategic empathizing can be discerned by studying techniques of bounded, ambassadorial, and broadcast narrative empathy in novels.

Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy

Valuation and assessment of antiques are in the focus of the thesis: the symbolic and narrative character of these objects of the past makes them a special case among other singular goods. Their value developed over time into a number of orders of worth (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006) where antiques are conceptualized as historical, cultural, aesthetic, sentimental, and financial assets. As objects of art, antiques are not standardized: in some cases they were produced as unique and single objects, in other cases the process for becoming a valued antique varied. Moreover, many antique objects have their own histories relaying evidence of the unique circumstances under which they produced, exchanged, possessed, lost and found again. As a result there are almost no antiques that can be assessed using one given set of criteria.
In market terms such characteristics translate into high uncertainty of quality for these goods. In light of this, the central question of the thesis is: How are antiques valued given the uncertainty of product quality and the context of unstable macro-structures in Russia? The main goal is to find market devices that help to solve this problem. An inquiry into the possible devices is presented in the empirical study of the antiques market in Russia as well as in research on the history and nature of unstable macro-structures that influence valuation.
The process of valuing antiques that involves appraisal and attribution is an ambiguous one: market actors need specialized knowledge in the field of decorative art and art history in order to make the correct judgments. Discontinuities in historical records mean that this specialized knowledge is often open to debate. What is more, specialized knowledge may be inaccessible to some market actors, or be too difficult for them to grasp in order to be able to make proper use of it. The past has to be taken into account, but it is also inherently uncertain. Thus actors in the antiques market have to cope with more than the traditional problem of uncertainty regarding the future: the discoveries of new artifacts, or just historical facts, can significantly influence the valuation of objects.

/pdf/valuing-the-past-the-constitution-of-the-antiques-market-in-1kxr9llo9r.pdf

Valuing the Past: The Constitution of the Antiques Market in Russia

This paper explores how narrative is understood and used by scholars in multiple disciplines to investigate social scientific issues This is not, however, a traditional literature review It is a report on an empirical study that involved systematic methods of data collection and analysis The data in this case are scholarly literature on narrative, and an inductive analysis reveals three emergent themes The first is the general tendency to view narrative as a formative mechanism in the construction of self and reality The second addresses the ways narrative is conceptualized in terms of linguistic features, including structural and formal qualities, and how these features are studied in relation to social interaction The third theme addresses how narrative is understood and employed as a method of social research This paper contributes a valuable resource on narrative studies for scholars working within multiple disciplines

/pdf/stories-of-narrative-on-social-scientific-uses-of-narrative-4t3533kmr0.pdf

Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

Citations

Sketching geopolitics: comics and the case of the Cheonan sinking

Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy

Valuing the Past: The Constitution of the Antiques Market in Russia

Stories of Narrative: On Social Scientific Uses of Narrative in Multiple Disciplines

(Re-)Creating Order: Narrativity and Implied World Views in Pictures

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