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 also member of the editorial board of the Korea Journal.

At the moment, I work on:

• Visual politics of climate change. This includes:
  • 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).

  • And a Senior Research Fellowship (2021/2022) of 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 (see e.g. here).

I continue to work on several projects and topics including:

• 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.
• Global politics of remote sensing. This work asks how satellite vision relates to current geopolitical practice 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.
• 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: on conflict in Global Politics: A New Introduction (with Roland Bleiker) and on visuality in Thinking World Politics Otherwise (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, Picturing the international, 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.
• Photography of peace. This collaborative project examined the potentialities of peace photography in IR: Peace photography in Brazil and Colombia (with Frank Möller, Tampere Peach Research Institute).
• 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: 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).
• 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).