ABSTRACT
When I was a PhD student (1999–2003) studying newspaper representations of Central and Eastern Europe during NATO and EU expansion, Klaus Dodds’s and Jo Sharp’s work was central to the way in which I came to position my work within wider literatures. More importantly, however, when I subsequently decided to shift from ‘legitimate’ news media to the decidedly more vulgar study of superheroes and their imbrication in geopolitical discourse, it was their critical opening into the worlds of popular culture that gave me the courage to push the boundaries of what was acceptable to study within the field of critical geopolitics. Both had paved the way for my work, Dodds with his analyses of political cartoons and James Bond films, and Sharp with her work looking at the treatment of Russia (as a mirror for American identity) in Reader’s Digest magazine. I think it is safe to say that, without these two scholars, there would either be no field of popular geopolitics or it would have taken a much different form at a much later date.
