(Em)placing the popular in Cultural Geography

Geographers have long been interested in popular culture, exploring everything from music and film, to fashion and sport. However, there remain some gaps in the field with some of the biggest and most widely consumed genres of popular culture suffering from neglect. Given the pace of technological change, geographers have been noticeably slow to come to grips with new digital popular 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 entry point into, encounters with places and people, and as a producer of spatiality and social relations. This editorial uses the concept of (em)placement to identify the complex overlaps, imbrications, and interlockings between social, cultural, and technological actors/actants. (Em)placement is also deployed 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. 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 engagements with popular culture, and how such engagement can facilitate encounters as