Some popular cultural geographies, starring Cyrille Regis, Delia Derbyshire, an Ewok, Mickey Mouse, Napalm Death, the Sylvanian families, and anonymous hate mail…

Abstract

This essay is about many things including, but not limited to, Cyrille Regis, Delia Derbyshire, an Ewok badge, Mickey Mouse, Napalm Death, the Sylvanian Families, anonymous hate mail, bereavement, the luminous popular cultures of the often-deprecated English Midlands, the absence of so many amazing popular cultures from Social & Cultural Geography, and my own recurrent failure to write about these things. It is part of a Special Issue on (Em)placing the Popular in Cultural Geography. The essay opens out a set of questions and prompts for reflection about the relationship (or, more often, the weird non-relationship) between disciplines of Social and Cultural Geography and contemporary popular cultures. At its heart, you’ll find six fragments of autoethnographic writing dealing with: popular cultural absences and silences in the written canon of Human Geography; joy and recognition, but also the burden of doing justice to popular cultures; and manifold antipathies towards academic work on popular culture.

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