Social & Cultural Geography

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(Em)placing the popular in Cultural Geography

Alex Hastie & Robert A. Saunders

To cite this article: Alex Hastie & Robert A. Saunders (08 Dec 2023): (Em)placing the popular in
Cultural Geography, Social & Cultural Geography, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2023.2289987
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SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2023.2289987

INTRODUCTION

(Em)placing the popular in Cultural Geography

Alex Hastie1 and Robert A. Saunders2
1
School of Energy, Construction, and Environment, Coventry University, Coventry, UK; 2Department of
History, Politics, and Geography, Farmingdale State College, State University of New York, New York, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Geographers have long been interested in popular culture, explor­ Received 6 October 2023
ing everything from music and film, to fashion and sport. However, Accepted 30 October 2023
there remain some gaps in the field with some of the biggest and KEYWORDS
most widely consumed genres of popular culture suffering from Popular culture; (em)
neglect. Given the pace of technological change, geographers have placement; cultural
been noticeably slow to come to grips with new digital popular geography; digital
media. This special issue presents work that interrogates popular
culture ranging from the new to the old for its role as a vector for, or PALABRAS CLAVE
entry point into, encounters with places and people, and as cultura popular;
emplazamiento; geografía
a producer of spatiality and social relations. This editorial uses the cultural; digital
concept of (em)placement to identify the complex overlaps, imbri­
cations, and interlockings between social, cultural, and technologi­ MOTS-CLEFS
cal actors/actants. (Em)placement is also deployed to expand the Culture populaire; (position)
space for popular culture as an object of study in geography in nement; géographie
order to foster more diverse engagements, and the freedom to culturelle; numérique
engage, with popular culture in the discipline. In doing so, we
highlight contributions to cultural geography, bringing into focus
the ways in which popular culture has been redefined in a time of
heightened digital and deterritorialized engagement alongside
restrictions on physical interaction enforced during the COVID-19
lockdowns. Finally, the editorial introduces the seven papers in this
special issue, drawing attention to workaday and active engage­
ments with popular culture, and how such engagement can facil­
itate encounters as

Emplazar lo popular en la geografía cultural

RESUMEN
Los geógrafos llevan mucho tiempo interesados en la cultura
popular, explorando todo, desde la música y el cine, hasta la
moda y el deporte. Sin embargo, siguen existiendo algunos
vacíos en este campo y algunos de los géneros de la cultura
popular más importantes y consumidos sufren de abandono.
Dado el ritmo del cambio tecnológico, los geógrafos han
tardado notablemente en abordar los nuevos medios digitales
populares. Este número especial presenta el trabajo que inter­
roga la cultura popular, desde lo nuevo hasta lo viejo, por su
papel como vector o punto de entrada a encuentros con

CONTACT Alex Hastie alexhastie90@gmail.com School of Energy, Construction, and Environment, Coventry
University, Sir John Laing Building, Much Park Street, Coventry CV1 2LT, UK
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 A. HASTIE AND R. A. SAUNDERS

lugares y personas, y como productor de espacialidad

y relaciones sociales. Este numero especial utiliza el concepto
de emplazar para identificar las complejas superposiciones,
imbricaciones y entrelazamientos entre actores/actantes socia­
les, culturales y tecnológicos. Emplazar también se implementa
para ampliar el espacio para la cultura popular como objeto
de estudio en geografía con el fin de fomentar
interacciones más diversas y la libertad de interactuar con la
cultura popular en la disciplina. Al hacerlo, destacamos las
contribuciones a la geografía cultural, poniendo atención
a las formas en que la cultura popular se ha redefinido en
una época de mayor uso digital y desterritorializado junto con
restricciones a la interacción física impuestas durante el confi­
namiento de COVID-19. Finalmente, esta editorial presenta
siete artículos de este número especial, llamando la atención
sobre los compromisos activos y cotidianos con la cultura
popular, y cómo dicha interacción puede facilitar encuentros
como puntos de partida para el aprendizaje, la creación de
significado, la comunicación interpersonal y el compromiso
social y transnacional.

Éditorial : Position(nement) du populaire dans la

géographie culturelle
RÉSUMÉ
Les géographes s’intéressent depuis longtemps à la culture populaire
et explorent tous ses aspects, de la musique au cinéma en passant par
la mode et le sport. Néanmoins, il reste des lacunes dans ce domaine et
certains des genres les plus importants et les plus consommés se
voient ignorés. Compte tenu du rythme de l’évolution technologique,
les géographes ont été remarquablement lents à s’attaquer à la ques­
tion des médiums numériques populaires modernes. Cette édition
spéciale présente des recherches qui sondent la culture populaire,
ancienne ou moderne, pour analyser son rôle de vecteur, ou de
point d’entrée, dans les confluences entre les lieux et les personnes,
ainsi que celui de producteur de spatialité et de relations sociales. Cet
éditorial utilize le concept de position(nement) pour identifier les
simultanéités, les imbrications et les entrelacements entre acteurs et
actants sociaux, culturels et technologiques. On se sert aussi de ce
concept pour élargir l’espace de la culture populaire en tant qu’objet
de recherche géographique pour promouvoir des rencontres plus
diverses et plus libres envers elle dans la discipline. Ce faisant, nous
soulignons les contributions à la géographie culturelle et mettons en
évidence les manières par lesquelles on a redéfini la culture populaire
au cœur d’une période d’engagement déterritorialisé et numérique
exacerbé pendant les restrictions d’interaction physique imposées
pendant les confinements de la pandémie de COVID-19. Pour finir,
l’éditorial introduit les sept articles contenus dans cette édition
spéciale, mettant l’accent sur les interactions actives et quotidiennes
avec la culture populaire, et les façons par lesquelles celles-ci peuvent
faciliter les rencontres en tant que point de départ pour l’apprentis­
sage, la création de sens, la communication interpersonnelle et l’enga­
gement transnational et sociétal.
 SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 3

1. Introduction
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984, p. 6) refers to the ‘distinctions’ that ‘social
subjects’ make between ‘the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar’:
a hierarchy of taste that distinguishes ‘high’ or ‘legitimate’ forms of culture from ‘low’ or
‘popular’ culture. For Bourdieu, legitimate forms of culture such as opera, ballet, and fine
art were for the elite few who possessed the necessary cultural and financial capital with
which to access and consume. Whereas popular culture could be defined as culture of the
common people, or the masses: cultural forms that might include screened media
(movies, TV programmes, etc.), contemporary music, games, toys, and fads for which
there are lower requirements for entry, are mass or commercially produced, and which
have less intellectual and more everyday meaning for people. These distinctions are now
less clear and geographers have long been attuned to the complex ways people access,
consume, and produce popular culture. For geographers, popular culture provides valu­
able insight into the production of spatial and social relations, how people negotiate their
place in the world, their sense of identity and community, and how people come into
contact with other people and places.
The study of popular culture within the discipline of geography has a rich history,
including the exploration of music (Kirby, 2019; Kong, 1995; Smith, 1997), film (Caprotti,
2009; da Costa et al., 2004; Hastie, 2020), television (Glynn & Cupples, 2015; Saunders,
2019), photography (Giubilaro, 2020), videogames (Ash & Gallacher, 2011; Shaw, 2010),
radio programming (Pinkerton & Dodds, 2009), novels (Dittmer, 2008; Kneale, 2006),
children’s books (Seitz, 2022), comedy (Purcell et al., 2010), toys (Horton, 2018), cartoons
(Dodds, 1996; Manzo, 2012), and comics (Dittmer & Larsen, 2007; Dunnett, 2009;
Gallacher, 2011), in addition to geographical interrogation of sport (Koch, 2013; Saville,
2008), tourism (Keighren & Withers, 2012; Mostafanezhad & Promburom, 2018), and other
leisure activities which are clearly within the realm of what constitutes the popular, from
beer halls (Dennett & Page, 2017) to fashion (Bide, 2019) to tattooing (Botz-Bornstein,
2013). Despite this long list of popular cultures, there remain some stunning lacunae in
the field. Geographers have been somewhat ‘coy’ (Horton, 2019) about their approach,
often disregarding some of the most influential and widely consumed genres of popular
culture, identified by Horton (2019, p. 267) in this journal to include ‘Beyoncé, Bowie, and
Bollywood’. And, given the pace of societal and technological change, for example the
advent of what has widely been referred to as the ‘platform society’ (Barns, 2019),
geographers have been slow to come to grips with new media such as video-sharing
platforms, and how popular cultures and events produce new social-spatial relations,
remake older ones, and fuse ‘old’ and ‘new’ spaces in novel ways.
Whilst not all contributions in this special issue deal directly with digital technologies, it
is unsurprisingly a common theme and one that will shape future studies of popular
culture in the discipline. This is particularly relevant given that contemporary fandom,
while maintaining some of its older aspects, is primarily conducted via social media, the
Internet, and other forms of digital interactions. The digital turn (Ash et al., 2018) in
cultural geography reflects an increasingly porous border between the ‘real’ and the
‘imaginary’, pushing geographers to explore a cascading array of popular engagements
with spatiality that are conjured through technology (Dixon, 2008; Rose, 2016b; Warf,
2009). Yet digital geographies scholarship has so far largely been concerned with
4 A. HASTIE AND R. A. SAUNDERS

algorithms, data, and surveillance (see Amoore, 2018; Fields et al., 2020), as well as the
capacity of smart media to transform the home (see Maalsen, 2022), often neglecting
more popular forums such as entertainment and social media. There are some recent
exceptions to these trends, for example Bennett et al. (2022) investigation of Twitter for its
capacity to produce new forms of ‘sociality and connection’ in the context of ‘everyday
multiculturalism’. Furthermore, Woods (2020) argues that platforms such as YouTube and
SoundCloud have eroded the barriers for British Grime music to enter the mainstream.
The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly lock-down measures taken by
governments across the globe, have deepened and widened the role of the popular in
spatial relations. For many, work-from-home measures and/or online learning established
conditions wherein individuals spent nearly all of their waking hours facing a screen,
toggling between Zoom meetings with colleagues or fellow students and scrolling social
media feeds, watching streaming services, engaging in virtual tourism, immersing them­
selves in videogame worlds, shopping online, and engaging hobby, exercise, and self-
help forums with others over the Internet, not to mention virtual visits with doctors,
therapists, and other medical professionals. Convergence culture – or the overlap
between prosumption of media (rather than its simple consumption), collaborative
‘intelligence’ via open-source media, and continually evolving digital realms of engage­
ment and activity – continues to reshape the ways in which groups and individuals make
sense of spatial dynamics and assign meaning to places. Indeed, we have entered a brave
and sometimes disturbing new world, as a recent Atlantic cover story on the blurring of
the line between reality and fantasy note: ‘QAnon adherents live in a universe of fiction;
they trust, above all, in the anonymous showrunner who is writing and directing and
producing reality’ (Garber, 2023, p. 26). These popular, populist, and conspiratorial geo­
graphies have real-life consequences, from the storming of the US capitol on
6 January 2021 to ‘Stop the Steal’ and keep Trump in power, to the attempted coup
d’état by the Reichsbürger movement in late 2022 aimed at installing Heinrich XIII Prince
Reuss as ruler of Germany, to sophisticated manipulations of reality surrounding the war
in Ukraine. Recent developments such as the rise of the so-called ‘Metaverse’ and the
expanded utility of artificial intelligence (AI) engines can only be expected to continue this
blending of cyber-realms and physical space, particularly when counterpoised against the
growing popularity of deterritorialized video-sharing platforms, the weaponization of
social media in real-world conflicts, the proliferation of ‘deep fake’ footage, and the
rapid uptake of chatbot engine use as a substitute for human-generated content in
arenas of work, education, and socialization.
This special issue presents work that interrogates popular culture ranging from the
new (see McLean et al., 2023 on TikTok) to the old (see Watson, 2023 on radio) for its
role as a vector for, or entry point into, encounters with places and people, and as
a producer of spatiality and social relations. This is illustrated through the concept of
(em)placement. On the one hand, this affordance works to identify the complex
overlaps, imbrications, and interlockings between social, cultural, and technological
actors/actants. On the other hand, our use of (em)placement is meant to expand the
space for popular culture as an object of study in geography in order to foster more
diverse engagements, and the freedom to engage, with popular culture in the
discipline. Horton’s contribution to this special issue is enlightening, in this sense,
as he reflects on the possible perception that the study of popular culture in
 SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 5

geography is ‘. . .not proper, serious, important, valid, worthy, BIG, impactful, heroic,
changemaking, bankable scholarship’. This editorial begins by fleshing out (em)
placement further, whilst considering what this intervention means for cultural
geography more broadly, before introducing all seven articles in turn.

2. (Em)placing the popular in cultural geography

In this special issue, we have flagged up the importance of emplacement, which in lay
terms simply means the act of placing something somewhere. However, as a geological
term, emplacement is much more specific, referencing the ‘attainment of the present
position of a particular intrusive mass of rock’, usually resulting from magma flows from
deep within the planet (Whyte, 1989). Such ‘filling in’ of space from below is primordial,
even godlike as hinted at in the colloquial name for such igneous deposits as ‘plutonic’
rocks, as these often hold trace amounts of precious metals like gold. However, emplace­
ment is also a concept within the field of entrepreneurialism. Here, it refers to a dynamic
positionality that guides specific practices and how these are ‘formed, performed, and
transformed’; such ways of being and doing are ‘grounded in sensations’, which in turn
allow for more efficient navigation of the various ecosystems of meaning that social actors
contribute to and co-create (Antonacopoulou & Fuller, 2020, p. 257). Taking the common­
place, quotidian definition of emplacement as the central spike of this conceptual trident,
some of the interventions in this special issue are focused on putting something some­
where, and how this changes the world. Other contributions more strongly embrace one
of two lateral meanings: certain pieces work with popular culture as something that
bubbles up filling empty spaces, providing potentially valuable deposits for future
explorers of the depths of the human experience; other articles demonstrate the ways
in which popular culture functions as a set of dynamic practices that inform, shape, and
co-create various milieus of meaning through performance and reception. Our interest in
popular culture’s new directions in geography reflect these disparate threads of thought,
as well the notion of ‘placement’ - denuded of the (em) – which implies calculated action
with the goal of situating an entity (be it an object, idea, image, or soundscape) for some
purpose (aesthetic, political, cultural, or social). In its variegated relationship with ‘Earth
writing’, popular culture thus represents a unique force, particularly via its force of
representation (Anderson, 2019).
To achieve this (em)placing of the popular in cultural geography, it is worth
further reflecting on what we mean by both popular culture and cultural geography.
As discussed above, popular culture can be understood in terms of its mass appeal
and ease of access (either in terms of cost or intelligibility/meaningfulness), quanti­
tatively measured by the number of people who consume or participate in it.
However, accepting this definition produces a range of cultural meanings, attach­
ments, and hierarchies that often position popular culture as ‘low brow’, with all
kinds of classed associations that distinguish it from ‘high brow’ culture like theatre,
opera, or classical music, as opposed to blockbuster films, reality TV programmes,
and hip-hop. Whilst we might agree that popular culture is defined by its low
barriers to entry, we ought not to be bound by these distinctions and hierarchies
of taste, particularly in an age where all kinds of culture are more open and
accessible (though still unevenly) owing to the ubiquitous nature of digital
6 A. HASTIE AND R. A. SAUNDERS

technology. Moreover, in the current milieu of mash-up culture, many consumers of

‘low’ culture are aware of certain elements of ‘high’ culture via parodic novels, The
Simpsons, graphic novels, music videos, street festivals, and other means of culture
conveyance (Saunders & Strukov, 2017). So, whilst contributions in this issue do
indeed engage with some of those ‘big’ popular cultures such as Game of Thrones
(see Doppelhofer, 2023) and family history (see Saunders, 2023), less obvious exam­
ples include Radio 4 (see Watson, 2023) and the band The Blue Nile (see Milburn,
2023).
When we insist that popular culture in its various forms produce social-spatial
relations, even making space, we are of course relying on, and taking for granted,
the ‘new cultural geography’ formed in the late 1980s. This body of work pioneered
by the likes of Jackson (1989), centred systems of representation and mediation in
the cultural politics of society which ‘formed the basis for addressing a variety of
“issues” which were significant at that conjuncture including race, gender, nation,
nature, and culture’ (Bartolini et al., 2016, p. 746). Since then, non-representational
theory (and later, more-than-representational theory), in its critique of representa­
tion, has turned our attention to the everyday, to embodiment, affect, emotions, and
feeling, to culture as assembled effect, culture as mediated experience, and culture
as forms-of-life (Anderson, 2020). People interact with, negotiate, consume, and
produce popular cultures in ways that cut across and transcend these dominant
paradigms in cultural geography, posing further questions and challenges to the
subdiscipline.
This question of ‘what culture for what geography?’ is posed in a recent special
issue in Social & Cultural Geography. Bartolini et al. (2016) special issue is a profound
example of the existing diversity in the journal and the discipline more broadly. Whilst
not always directly dealing with popular culture at a conceptual level, articles in the
special issue explore the role of popular culture figures such as Jamie Oliver (Jackson,
2016) in shaping attitudes towards food consumption and the ways that cultural
meaning is produced on Twitter, given ‘the subdiscipline’s general lack of interest in
social media’ (Rose, 2016a, p. 763). Kinsley’s (Kinsley, 2016, p. 793) provocation in the
same special issue carries particular weight for us, as he asks, ‘how might we better
accommodate “popular culture” in our cultural geographies?’ Specifically, he highlights
a tendency within the discipline to ‘imply a form of taste’, to a neglect of popular
writers such as Dan Brown and E. L. James, and an aspiration for what he refers to as
an ‘unbearable lightness’ and not ‘fifty shades of cultural geography’ (Kinsley, 2016,
p. 794). These studies, published in Social & Cultural Geography demonstrate that, to
borrow the words of Bartolini et al. (2016), the discipline and journal is indeed a ‘lively
place’ from which to engage with such questions, but that geographers, as Kinsley
(2016) and Rose (2016a) in particular point out, must continue to push the boundaries
of what is ‘read’, ‘watched’, ‘played’, and ‘listened’ to, and how these popular cultures
are mediated, engaged with, and (re)interpreted. This is echoed elsewhere in other
recent interventions in cultural geography which have highlighted the need to pay
attention to the complex ‘production, circulation, and modification’ (Rose, 2016b,
p. 336) of meaning in the digital world, whilst also warning of the ‘vexed’ nature of
the term culture itself (Rose, 2021) as an analytical tool or object of study.
 SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 7

This special issue then, brings into focus the ways in which popular culture has been
redefined in a time of heightened digital and deterritorialized engagement alongside
restricted physical interaction. Moreover, we explore the ways in which popular culture is
becoming increasingly bound to the real through variegated and multivalent ways of
binding the unreal, imaginary, and the supposedly ‘real’ together in new ways. In doing
so, these contributions reinforce Sauer’s (1931, cited in Rose, 2021, p. 959) ‘insistence that
culture is the dominant variable in the organisation and patterning of our geographical
world’, while advancing this notion by placing the all-important, though equally loaded
and complex, adjective ‘popular’ before culture. If popular culture can reinforce and
challenge social and geographical norms, so can its consumers who engage with content
in new ways by imagining and ultimately reifying new worlds. Consequently, we must
study people’s engagement with popular culture to better understand how spaces are
made, remade, and even unmade, and should furthermore recognize that such an under­
taking is one without any definitive conclusion given that culture is that what humans
make and humans are always making it.

3. Contributions in this special issue

This collection of articles thus engages with and contributes to some key areas of cultural
geography, particularly notions of place, identity, belonging, mobility, power, encounter,
materiality, and the digital in order to inform, expand, and complicate debates around the
geographies of popular culture. First, mass consumed culture of all kinds matter in ways
that are banal or mundane, and are often embedded in ‘sensuous, affective, everyday
practice’ (Horton, 2010, p. 390). As Horton points out, using the case of British pop group
S-Club 7 in the actual lives of a group of schoolchildren, popular culture can and should be
investigated beyond the commonly used frameworks of the discursive and representa­
tional. This more-than-representational approach has been favoured in the study of
popular geopolitics, focusing ‘on the everyday intersection of the human body with
places, environments, objects, and discourse’ (Dittmer & Gray, 2010, 1673), inspiring
geographers to explore quotidian and domestic geopolitical encounters through dance
(Rogers, 2018), songs (Dell’agnese, 2015), comic books (Peterle, 2017), games (Bos, 2018),
toys (Woodyer & Carter, 2020) and TV shows (Thorogood, 2020). These approaches
privilege active encounters with forms of popular culture and their networks/relational­
ities in ways that inform the production of space and place at scales ranging from the
body to the nation. For example, Woodyer and Carter’s (2020, p. 1068) recent research
into Her Majesty’s Armed Forces toy range uncovers the ways in which distant geopolitical
events become embedded and enlivened in the home through ludic engagement,
reframing ‘popular geopolitics as an encounter between texts, objects, bodies and
practices, as evidenced in the messy network that is play’.
Second, popular cultures (are used to) facilitate encounters, teaching people important
skillsets such as intercultural contact and mobility, including as with the previous case
study, distant conflict. This is a rudimental but important point as popular media often act
as starting points for learning, meaning-making, interpersonal communication, and soci­
etal and transnational engagement. For example, Saunders (2017) explores the ways in
which nations deploy popular cultural artefacts and imagery in order to reshape and
invite particular readings of their geographical imaginaries, which for many including
8 A. HASTIE AND R. A. SAUNDERS

diplomats, tourists, and investors serve as important points of entry. Widely consumed
music and film also shapes and reframes the way we think about mobility and impacts the
way we act in the world. For example, in work that he extends in this special issue through
the lyrics of Glaswegian group The Blue Nile, Milburn’s (2019, p. 749) earlier work explores
the kinds of mobility embodied and encouraged by the music of Frank Sinatra, arguing
that records such as Come Fly With Me were key to ‘the promotion of rapidly evolving
cultures of travel, leisure, and celebrity’ of the time. Mostafanezhad and Promburom
(2018) similarly argue that the film Lost in Thailand (2012) had material effects in the
real world, producing popular geopolitical experiences, contributing to the growth of
tourism in Thailand. These examples demonstrate, as do the articles in this special issue,
that popular culture is an important actor/actant in producing, informing, and (b)ordering
encounters with place.
The contributions consider the ways in which popular culture phenomena shape our
perceptions and experiences of place, from banal spaces and activities such as reading
(Cook), and care and identity (McLean et al.), to spaces of migration (Watson), music
(Milburn), and tourism (Doppelhofer). The popular-cultural geographies explored here are
connected by Rose’s (Rose, 2021, p. 963) definition of geography as ‘means by which
culture reflects and expresses the internalised meanings and value of a community, and in
the process normalises those ideas within material space’. The authors in this special issue
also bring our attention to some of the world’s most commercially and culturally success­
ful shows and films including Game of Thrones (Doppelhofer) and Who Do You Think You
Are? (Saunders), arguing that social and cultural geographers take ‘big’ popular culture
seriously. The interventions herein also provide opportunities for dialogue with and across
debates in digital geographies, with a focus not only on representation, but also produc­
tion, transmission, consumption, recycling, massaging, and distortion of various forms of
(popular) culture. The special issue aims to broaden the field of cultural geography so that
it may more effectively engage with issues and objects of study that are often considered
to lie outside of ‘popular culture’, such as stories about migration on the radio (Watson),
the racialized histories of genealogy (Saunders), and successful bands with small but loyal
fanbases like The Blue Nile (Milburn). In doing so, these articles take us closer towards
a broader definition of what counts as popular culture within the discipline, and a better
understanding of its affective possibilities, as well as expanding the ‘who’ of producers,
consumers, and prosumers.
Horton’s autoethnographic contribution to this special issue draws attention to the
absences and silences, the joy and recognition, the burden of doing justice to popular
cultures, and the antipathies towards popular culture in human geography. In doing so,
he writes a personal account of his own relationship to popular culture throughout his life,
to explain how and why geographers have (until now) failed to recognize its academic
value, and invites geographers to do work that they care about in ways are collaborative,
care-full, and that pays attention to the necessary ‘conditions, practices, and networks’ to
achieve sustained work in popular cultural geography. From a holistic level, Horton’s
intervention charts new ways of doing geography through the scholar’s emplacement of
the self within the fissures of culture and its various places and spaces.
Horton’s contribution sets the tone for the special issue in that what follows are a series
of articles that do exactly this. McLean, Lupton, and Southerton examine the role of
Chinese-owned video hosting service TikTok in ‘amplifying and configuring cultural
 SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 9

meanings’. They pay specific attention to the ways in which young people use the
platform to produce spaces of care, to nurture relationships, and construct identity. The
article challenges possible pre-conceptions about both young people and social media
platforms, placing the agency of TikTok’s young users at the heart of their argument,
centring their self-awareness of the application’s possibilities and limitations, whilst call­
ing for more research at the intersection digital popular cultures and geographies of care.
Contributions by Watson on B.B.C. Radio 4 and Milburn on The Blue Nile might not
be what you expect from a special issue on popular culture. B.B.C. Radio 4, as Watson
points out early on in their article, has ‘stereotypical connotations of highbrow
programming and middle-class appeal’. However, digital technology and social
media platforms extend the reach of such programmes and make them more widely
available and accessible, combined with Radio 4’s status as ‘the largest listenership for
a non-music radio station with 10.6 million people tuning in weekly’. Whilst we might
not be able to make the same quantitative case for The Blue Nile, Milburn’s article
does speak to the arguments put forward by Horton in that it reflects the author’s
passion for the band, what Horton refers to as the importance of ‘joy’, ‘recognition’,
‘hope’, and ‘fun’ of researching what you love. But also, as Milburn points out in their
analysis, the fact that The Blue Nile exist within and draw from wider popular culture
worlds and influences. Watson’s article critiques the privileging of the visual in cultural
geography, drawing our ear to the imaginative geography of radio and its ‘power to
shape how listeners understand, imagine, and engage in the world’. They focus on
a 25-part documentary about the Dhnie family as they travel from Turkey to Germany,
centring the ‘sounds and voices’ of one kinship unit, a ‘sonic sensibility’ and ‘anti-
geopolitics’ that ‘invites listeners to imagine the Dhnies as tangible, recognizable and
relatable human beings’. Milburn’s piece similarly privileges the sonic, specifically song
lyrics, pointing to the twin absence of attention to sound and words of music in favour
of music scenes and production. Milburn pays close attention to The Blue Nile,
conducting a close reading of their lyrical insights into urban space, experience, and
emotion, with particular focus on how their music engages and ‘relay[s] anxieties’
about the ‘multiple rhythms of urban life’. Both articles demonstrate the imaginative
geographies of sound, whilst making permeable the boundaries of what constitutes
popular culture in geography.
Cook’s article too examines the imaginative production of urban space through
words, focusing on the literary rather than the musical as they read Ian Rankin’s John
Rebus detective novels for what they reveal about underground Edinburgh. Using the
subterranean – a much-neglected spatial form – as a metaphor for the hidden social
ills of urban Edinburgh, Cook not only illuminates some of the injustices of urban life,
but also calls for the recognition of crime fiction’s ability, not unlike geography, to ‘cast
a critical eye on society’. In doing so, Cook responds to both Kinsley (2016) and
Horton’s (2019) earlier critiques of the discipline’s perception of such popular culture
as ‘formulaic’, or ‘predictable’, convincingly insisting on the place, and future, of
popular literature in geography.
Saunders’ article investigates internationally popular genealogy programme Who Do
You Think You Are? and lineage work more generally as a ‘biosocial form of place-making’.
Their intervention attests to the important role of geopolitics in everyday lives, whilst
extending this through a close reading of British, US, and South African episodes of the
10 A. HASTIE AND R. A. SAUNDERS

show in order to ask questions of how ‘power and privilege in Anglophone settler colonies
are unpacked through spatially-inflected narrations of celebrities’ private pasts meant for
popular consumption’. In doing so, Saunders presents genealogy as a popular cultural
practice that ‘connects us to others across time and space’ and ‘embodies . . . that form of
culture which is most widely accessible and commonly shared: belonging to a family’.
Doppelhofer’s contribution takes us to Game of Thrones’ fictional land of Westeros, via
Northern Ireland, interrogating its post-conflict landscape of tourism, reconciliation, and
place-making through the lens of the TV adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series.
The article speaks to the most fundamental aspects of our approach to popular culture in
that Game of Thrones functions as an important entry point into, or vector through which,
the complex history, present, and future of Northern Ireland can be tangibly experienced.
Using a multi-sited visual ethnography, Doppelhofer interrogates the production of what
they call a ‘diegetic heritage’ in Northern Ireland in conjunction with the seemingly
disparate fantasy fiction world of Game of Thrones. In doing so, the article finds that
popular culture goes beyond representation to be seen as an active participant and
producer of place/space, in this case heritages.

Acknowledgments
We would like to begin by thanking all of the authors in this special issue for their exciting and
insightful contributions. Thanks are also extended to those who have been involved in some way at
earlier stages, including those who contributed to the RGS 2019 session ‘Geography and Popular
Culture: Hopeful Stories in Troubled Times(?)’ and Coventry symposium entitled ‘(Em)placing the
Popular in Cultural Geography’ in 2022, including Jamie Halliwell, Paul Hurley, Darren Purcell, Lisa
Funnell, Morag Rose, Maja de Neergaard, Mette Mechlenborg, Dave McLaughlin, Jo Norcup, and Joe
Thorogood. All of your contributions inspired us to form ideas for this special issue. We also wish to
thank the editorial team at Social & Cultural Geography, especially David Bissell and John Horton, for
the support and encouragement shown throughout the process.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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