D.U. (David) Shim, Dr

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. My work appeared in, among others, International Political Sociology, Geoforum, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, and Review of International Studies. My book Visual Politics and North Korea is available at Routledge.

My regional focus has been East Asia with an emphasis on the Korean peninsula. However, I have also examined issues of war and peace in Europe (Germany) and South America (Colombia). I have translated some of my research activities into teaching practice on my blog Visual Global Politics. I am an advisory board member of the German Association for Asian Studies and of the Research Committee – Visual Politics of the International Political Science Association.

At the moment, I work on:

Visual politics of climate change. This includes:

Security Imaginaries of Climate Movements (SECIMA):

• How do activists 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 methods.

• SECIMA explores new methodological pathways: activists from climate movements such as Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future and the Last Generation take part in the project as citizen scientists. As „citizen scientists“, the activists are involved in all stages of the project – from the development of the main research questions to the collection, and interpretation of data.

• SECIMA is jointly funded by the University of Groningen and the University of Hamburg and led by Dr. Delf Rothe (ISFH) and Dr. David Shim (IRIO).

• The outcomes of SECIMA include multiple photo exhibitions—“Climate No Future”— in Groningen (Fotogalerie Lichtzone, Climate Justice Awareness Week 2026) and in Hamburg (Pop-Up Raum Grindel, Kunstklinik). The exhibitions, produced in collaboration with NonFiction Photo, showed images taken by members of Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future and the Last Generation to engage viewers with the climate crisis through the eyes of the protestors themselves.

• The Hamburg exhibition also featured a public panel on "Climate no Future? Images of the future and political action in the climate crisis" gathering academics, activists and journalists.

• Other outcomes are open access publications including the visual essay “Climate no future? Picturing imaginaries of climate activists between hope and violence” in Media, War & Conflict and the gallery feature “Visualizing climate imaginaries” in Visual Studies.

And a Senior Research Fellowship (2021/2022) at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research on “Visual Narratives of Climate Change”, in which I have examined how visual narratives are central to the strategies of legitimation in the contentious politics of climate change.

Outcomes include open access publications on:

• "Personalising climate change – how Fridays for Future visualises climate action on Instagram" in Humanities and Social Sciences Communication,

• "Showing Climate Action – Exploring Fridays for Future Germany’s Visual Activism on Flickr" in Visual Communication and

• "Performing legitimacy – exploring video clips by climate activists as everyday practices of (de)legitimation" in International Studies Review.

I continue to work on several projects and topics including:

Global politics of remote sensing and open source investigations. This work engages the politics of visual/digital technologies and asks in particular how satellite vision relates to current geopolitical practices and how it shapes our understanding of places, spaces and sites:

• Politics of satellite activism (with Delf Rothe, Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy),

• Satellite vision and geographical imagination,

• Satellites and political conflict,

• A contribution to a workshop on citizen monitoring of nuclear disarmament of Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.

Visual peace research. This collaborative research examined the potentialities of peace photography in IR:

• Peace photography in Brazil and Colombia and the impact of digitization on peace research (with Frank Möller, Tampere Peach Research Institute).

• A chapter is accepted for publication: Digitizing the Agenda of Visual Peace Research, in: Social Media and Conflict: Exploring the Role of Digital Spaces in Peacebuilding, Reuß, Anna and Stephan Stetter (eds.), Palgrave Macmillan (with Frank Möller).

Visual politics and North Korea. In this line of research I have engaged the ‘visual turn’ in IR and argued that images play a decisive role in how we come to know North Korea in world politics:

• A visual autoethnography of humanitarian-aid practices in North Korea, selected by the University of Groningen Library as its monthly open access publication.

• Imagining North Korea (with Dirk Nabers, University of Kiel, funded by the Academy of Korean Studies),

• Dark tourism in North Korea (with Dorina Buda, Leeds Beckett University),

• Symbolic practices of North Korea’s space programme (with Philipp Olbrich, RUG).

Visualizing Korea. A joint project with Roland Bleiker and David Chapman (University of Queensland), which examines how visual representations have shaped changing notions of Korean society, culture and nationhood:

• A Special Issue appeared in Asian Studies Review and features

• A contribution of mine on the ‘Cinematic Representations of the Gwangju Uprising: Visualising the “new” South Korea in A Taxi Driver’. This piece is among the top five most read articles of the journal.

Mediatisation of war. This project examines Germany as a special case for critical Military/Security Studies:

• German Armed Forces and the gendered mediatisation of war on Facebook,

• Militarized masculinities in recruitment videos of the German Armed Forces and

• Gendered Representation of Military Service in Die Rekruten (with Frank Stengel).

Textbook contributions:

• North Korea in International Politics, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, under review (with Sophie Kim).

• In Global Politics : A New Introduction (with Roland Bleiker).

• How can culture help reconciliation in war-torn societies? A case study of the role of theatre in post-genocide Rwanda, in: Dillon, Lorna and Erika Silva (ed.), Art, Human Rights, Social Justice and Peacebuilding, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (with Blanche Caroit, Stephan Engelkamp), forthcoming.

• Visuality, in: Shepherd, Laura (ed.), Thinking World Politics Otherwise, Oxford: Oxford University Press (with Lisa Bogerts).

Everyday spaces of the international. This work explores mundane places as conceptual venues to better understand (the study of) IR:

• Geopolitics and imaginiaries of home ,

• Visibility and public space (with Mohamed Saleh, Gerd de Roo).

Geopolitics of storytelling. This project asks how comics work as narrative sites of geopolitics: Sketching Geopolitics.

Contentious memory politics in East Asia and the case of the Statue of Peace . This project was funded by the Academy of Korean Studies (2019-2020) and addresses debates about the material rhetoric of places of remembrance. The project results have been published 2021 in Memory Studies .

South Korea as middle power. This project studied South Korea’s role in global politics: China and South Korea’s Afghanistan strategy (with Nadine Godehardt, German Institute for International and Security Affairs), Rising South Korea (with Patrick Flamm, University of Auckland, funded by the Korea Foundation), South Korea’s quest for global influence (with Philipp Olbrich).