Where’s Elvis and Trump? Where’s Godzilla and Gaga? Where’s Bowie and Beyoncé? Popular cultures in Social and Cultural Geography, 2000-2020

This provocation considers engagements with popular and media cultures in Social and Cultural Geography. I celebrate the journal’s major achievement in creating a space for substantial empirical-theoretical consideration of popular and media cultures, notably via sustained work on popular geopolitics, postcolonial cultures, and subcultural scenes. However, I also note the absence of so many iconic figures and forms of popular culture. In short: where are Elvis, Trump, Aretha, Godzilla, Gaga, Bowie, Beyoncé, Micky Mouse, Father Christmas and countless others, and how might we understand their absence from the journal? I argue that engagements with popular and media cultures in Social and Cultural Geography have been weirdly coy, time-lagged and uneven. I call for more scholarship attuned to, and alive with, these affecting, life-changing, identity-defining, power-laden geographies.