Symbolic Power: Heritage, Popular Culture, and the Reimagining of Influence

This panel explores how cultural forms—both institutionalized and everyday—are mobilized to assert authority, challenge domination, and reimagine political futures. From state-led heritage diplomacy to the subversive potential of satire, music, and digital media, culture becomes a battleground for legitimacy, resistance, and global influence. The panel brings together two emerging yet often disconnected conversations: first, the instrumentalization of history and heritage to legitimize geopolitical visions and redraw regional and global alliances; second, the use of popular culture in non-Western contexts to resist hegemonic narratives, challenge political orthodoxy, and articulate alternative imaginaries.
Together, these papers examine how symbolic forms—whether monuments, films, festivals, or memes—become vehicles of both statecraft and dissent. How do heritage narratives and pop cultural forms intersect in the construction or contestation of global orders? What happens when historical memory and mass-mediated aesthetics converge as instruments of soft power? By bringing these perspectives together, the panel invites new ways of understanding culture not as peripheral to politics, but as a key site of its construction and contestation.