178 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
This emphasis on official policy documents stems, at least in part, from mainstream IR’s self-
imposed state-centrism and its focus on “high politics”—once only the arena of diplomacy and
security, war and peace (e.g., Viner 1949), but increasingly also the arena of international eco-
nomics, of competitiveness and marketization (e.g., Keohane and Nye 1977). High politics—
understood as the “domain of hard truths, material realities, and irrepressible natural facts” (Ó
Tuathail and Agnew 1992, 192)—is real, serious politics, and vice versa. The canonical (if also
shifting) distinction between high and low politics has a methodological manifestation—what
one might call the distinction between “high” and “low” data.^3 Appropriate, serious—that is,
“high”—data are those that circulate among elite institutions, be they states, international organi-
zations, multinational corporations (MNCs), NGOs, or the media. Eschewed as irrelevant or,
worse, as inappropriately frivolous are “low data,” particularly from popular or mass culture.^4
Serious analyses of IR do not busy themselves with novels, films, television programs, computer
games, advertising, and the like.
But the connections between popular culture and world politics are intimate, complex, and
diverse, if also generally obscure, at least to many IR scholars. If we want to know how discourses
such as the neoliberal discourse of globalization are constituted, how publics understand these
discourses, how dominant discourses become common sense, and how such discourses might be
contested, it becomes apparent that “low data” are appropriate, fruitful, and indeed, as I argue
below, indispensable. Before discussing varieties of evidence, however, a brief theoretical detour
is in order to explain just why low data are a fertile domain for IR or other social research.A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKWhat justifies looking at low data? To understand how “globalization,” for instance,^5 has come to
invoke one set of connotations rather than another^6 and to account for its commonsense status, we
need to understand how it is represented; why, if at all, those representations are accepted; and
how, if at all, they are or might be contested. The reason is simple:^7 State policy and international
politics have a fundamentally cultural basis and state and other international actions are made
commonsensical through everyday cultural meanings, including those circulating in popular cul-
ture. What this means is, first, that decisions and actions of policy elites (state or otherwise)
cannot be understood without a corresponding grasp of the field of discourses—the broader cul-
tural repertoire of available meanings—through which those elites apprehend world politics and
their own place in it. Second, just as official representations depend upon the cultural resources of
a society, so too do the ways in which those elites’ representations of world politics are under-
stood. The plausibility of these representations depends upon the ways in which publics under-
stand both world politics and the location of their own and others’ states within it, and so how they
take up, or not, the representations of policy elites. Both the understandings and the “uptake”^8 are
produced not only in and through elite rhetoric, but also and more pervasively in and through the
mundane cultures of people’s everyday experiences. This, then, directly implicates popular cul-
ture in providing a background of meanings that help to constitute public images of world politics
and foreign policy. Popular culture thus helps to construct the social reality of world politics for
elites and publics alike. I elaborate a bit on this argument before turning to a more practical
discussion of varieties of evidence.
The “interpretive turn” in the social sciences, which highlighted questions of meaning and
representation, recognized that language does not mirror the world but instead constitutes the
world as we know it and function in it. The notion of discourse is one useful way to get at this
process of constitution. A discourse is a set of capabilities—a set of “socio-cultural resources