David ShimKäte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research
David Shim
PhD
I currently work on visual politics of climate change.
About
42
Publications
11,822
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331
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
My research contributes to the study of visual politics in the field of International Relations. My work
is located at the intersection of exploring the visual dimension of global politics and the political
dimension of the visual. In this way, I have engaged different visual media and artefacts including
comics, memorials, film, photography, satellite imagery and video.
Additional affiliations
September 2021 - present
Käte Hamburger Kolleg
Position
- Senior Researcher
December 2020 - October 2021
International Political Science Association
Position
- Board Member
August 2019 - present
Education
January 2009 - December 2012
Publications
Publications (42)
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 article takes a look at another prominent medium...
In recent years satellite imagery, previously restricted to the defense and intelligence communities, has been made available to a range of non-state actors as well. Non-governmental organizations, journalists, and celebrities like George Clooney now use remote sensing data like digital Sherlock Holmeses to investigate and reveal human rights abuse...
The connection between the everyday and the international has received increasing attention in critical IR in recent years. As many contributions aim to rethink the international in terms of the everyday, the mundane and the ordinary become a site of geopolitical analysis. The paper’s central idea is that we, as academics and human beings, constant...
How do people come to know the world? How do they get a sense of place and space? Arguably, one of the ways in which they do this is through the practice of remote sensing, among which satellite imagery is one of the most widespread and potent tools of engaging, representing and constructing space. This paper argues that satellite imagery is not on...
Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on socia...
This contribution examines visual climate storytelling of Fridays for Future’s (FFF) global climate strike on 24 September 2021. Running under #UprootTheSystem, the climate strikes meant a return to public spaces after Covid-19-related restrictions heavily impacted the movement’s ability to reach global audiences. We situate our piece in the ongoin...
This article analyzes the gendered representation of military service in the German YouTube series Die Rekruten (DR) (The Recruits), a popular web series produced on behalf of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) for recruitment purposes, which accompanies 12 navy recruits during their basic training. The article is situated within research on masc...
The purpose of this special issue is to examine how visual representations have shaped changing notions of Korean society, culture and nationhood. While images surround us, and are increasingly recognised as crucial, we know surprisingly little about the role visuality plays in the context of Korean politics and society. Only a few selected studies...
This paper discusses the material rhetoric of the Statue of Peace built in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. Installed in 2011 to commemorate so-called “comfort women”—the former sex slaves forced to work in brothels during Korea’s occupation by the Empire of Japan—, several identical-looking copies of the statue have since sprea...
This paper analyses the gendered representation of military service in
the German YouTube series Die Rekruten (DR) – a popular web series
produced by the German Armed Forces for recruiting purposes, which
accompanies twelve navy recruits during their basic training. It is
situated within research on masculinity, the military, and military
recruitin...
The description of public space usually hinges on two narratives of publicness: one narrative criticizes the State’s attempts to condition publicness on the basis of functionality, and the other denotes publicness with space that can be appropriated by ordinary people. However, there are no “pure” moments in which either narrative is neatly differe...
Open access!
The civic unrest in Gwangju in May 1980 marks one of the most important turning points in modern South Korea’s history and collective memory. The so-called Gwangju Uprising did nothing less than herald South Korea’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Images played an important role in this critical moment of change. Footage of...
Dieser Beitrag untersucht die diskursive Konstruktion militarisierter Maskulinität(en) in der von der Bundeswehr produzierten Webserie „Die Rekruten“ (DR). Insbesondere konzentriert er sich auf einen bestimmten Aspekt im Zusammenhang von Militärdienst und Nachwuchsgewinnung: was zieht junge Menschen in die Bundeswehr? In diesem Sinne fragt der Beit...
In this paper, we engage with IR's recently rediscovered interest in peace and connect it with the visual turn in international relations. We move the field's focus on representations of war to representations of peace and develop the concept of peace photography. We suggest both understanding photography as a social agent promoting visions of peac...
Despite international sanctions and a strained economy, North Korea continues to spend scarce resources on a costly space programme. Hitherto, research has usually explained this continuity in terms of international security and/or international reputation. Accordingly, Pyongyang uses its space-related efforts as a pretext to develop intercontinent...
The economic, political, and social situation in post-2014 Afghanistan remains uncertain, particularly because the effects of the US drawback from Afghanistan on national and regional stability are rather difficult to foresee. In this article, we explore how the debates about post-2014 Afghanistan impact others' thinking. Afghanistan forces nationa...
Desire is a continuous force, fundamentally eccentric and insatiable, yet insufficiently explored in tourism studies. To examine desire in tourism to ‘unusual’ places of darkness and danger we propose four interpretations of this psychoanalytic concept: desire as recognition, ‘object’ cause of desire, desire for novelty, and desire for fantasy. Ini...
The book engages the ‘visual turn’ in International Relations and, based on a discussion of two fields of vision – everyday photography and satellite imagery –, argue that images play a decisive role in how we come to know North Korea in contemporary geopolitics.
South Korea’s rising status in regional and global affairs has received much attention in recent years. But in academic, media and policy debates South Korea is usually regarded as a mere middle power that, due to its geopolitical situation, has only limited leeway in its foreign policy. Accordingly, it must constantly maneuver between its larger n...
North Korea puzzles many observers. Mostly, it is referred to as the most isolated country in the world, being a timeless mystery, enigma, or terra incognita. While these characterizations reveal the presupposition of a genuine void of knowledge concerning the assessment of North Korean state affairs (however, without preventing scholarship from pr...
Satellite imagery plays an important role in contemporary geopolitics. Arguably the most well‐known example is Colin Powell’s (in)famous presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003, during which he used satellite pictures to legitimate the invasion of Iraq. Satellite photographs draw on a techno‐scientific discourse that enables them t...
Im Dezember 2011 hat Südkorea das "Hochrangige Forum zur Wirksamkeit der Ent-wicklungszusammenarbeit" ausgerichtet. Im März 2012 wird es Gastgeber des "Gip-fels zur nuklearen Sicherheit" sein. Beide Großveranstaltungen unterstreichen die Am-bitionen Südkoreas, sich in der globalen Entwicklungszusammenarbeit und Sicherheit stärker einzubringen. Anal...
One of the major challenges in the development of South Korea’s innovation system is the search for the institutional structure that most suitably supports the country’s ambitious plans to become one of the leading innovation-driven economies. In particular, this involves the search for a state structure that provides the most effective stimulus fo...
One of the major challenges in the development of South Korea’s innovation system is the search for the institutional structure that most suitably supports the country’s ambitious plans to become one of the leading innovation-driven economies. In particular, this involves the search for a state structure that provides the most effective stimulus fo...
Within international discourses on security, North Korea is often associated with risk and danger, emanating paradoxically from what can be called its strengths - particularly military strength, as embodied by its missile and nuclear programs - and its weaknesses - such as its ever‐present political, economic, and food crises - which are considered...
This essay was written in reaction to the international symposium "Exploring North Korean Arts," which was held on the occasion of the art exhibition "Flowers for Kim Il Sung-Art and Architecture from the DPR Korea," in Vienna on September 3 and 4, 2010. The essay argues that scholars must recognize the significance of visual imagery in their appro...
This paper argues that the question of food (in)security in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is not necessarily indicative of the country’s actual nutritional conditions but is rather constituted through meaning‐making behavior — signifying practices — predominantly on the part of humanitarian aid institutions working there. The argument i...
To overcome the global economic crisis, many governments enacted comprehensive stimulus packages in the beginning of 2009. Parts of these recovery plans were devoted to 'green' economic programmes to account for the environmental sustainability of future growth policies. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme, two-thirds of these '...
This paper investigates the impact of international migration on technical efficiency, resource allocation and income from agricultural production of family farming in Albania. The results suggest that migration is used by rural households as a pathway out of agriculture: migration is negatively associated with both labour and non-labour input allo...
On October 9, 2006 North Korea conducted the first nuclear test in the history of the two Korean states, making it the ninth nuclear weapons state. Barely in office, new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was faced with the severest security crisis in North East Asia in recent years. An imminent nuclear arms race and escalation of tensions were fea...
On October 9th, 2006 North Korea conducted the first nuclear test in the history of the Korean peninsula, making it the ninth nuclear weapons state. Amid signs of improved relations between the triangle China, Japan and South Korea, they were faced with an unprecedented security challenge in North East Asia in recent years. Destabilization of the r...
Projects
Projects (10)
Security Imaginaries of Climate Movements (SECIMA):
How do climate movements imagine climate futures and what is the role of images in this process? The project examines the security imaginaries of climate movements and their underlying forms of visuality through participatory visual research methods. SECIMA explores new methodological pathways: activists from climate movements such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion take part in the project as citizen scientists. They are involved in the collection and interpretation of visual data and, therefore, play an essential role in addressing the project’s research questions. SECIMA is jointly funded by the University of Groningen and the University of Hamburg and led by Delf Rothe (ISFH) and David Shim (CIRR).
This project is linked to a 2021/2022 Senior Research Fellowship of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research. I will examine the visual politics of legitimation of transnational environmental movements fighting climate change. I will investigate how visual narratives are central to, and productive of, strategies of legitimation in the contentious politics of climate change. I will focus on Fridays for Future – a recent, transnational protest phenomenon, which has been highly successful in mobilizing people around the world to combat global climate change.
This research project is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies. The goal is to examine the memory politics of the so called "Statue of Peace"; a memorial to commemorate women, who were forced into sexual slavery during Korea’s occupation by the Empire of Japan. The project aims to make a contribution to debates about the material rhetoric of places of remembrance by looking beyond the symbolic dimension of memorial sites.
Please feel free to visit: https://statueofpeace.home.blog/
