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Vulgar geographies? Popular cultural geographies and technology

To explore what opportunities contemporary cultural phenomena may present for geographers, this short article poses two related questions: the first question is where is ‘popular culture’ in cultural geography? Following this, and by way of arguing that contemporary popular culture is always mediated, the second question is how do we address the technologies of (popular) culture in our geographies? The first part of this provocation, then, is: should cultural geography be more vulgar? The choice of words is deliberately provocative, but can be phrased differently as: how might we better accommodate ‘popular culture’ in our cultural geographies? My intention here is not to imply a derisory quality, I recognize the implication of ‘disgust’ and ‘distaste’ in the word ‘vulgar’, but that might be a perceived connotation of the continued and conspicuous paucity of geographical engagement with ‘popular culture’. Thus, on the contrary, in this article I want to challenge such implications. I argue, ‘vuglar’ is therefore a useful (if challenging) means of addressing the place of the ‘popular’ in cultural geographies. I also recognize that others have alluded to the absence of ‘popular’ cultural geographies (see, Barnett, 2008; Jackson, 1989, 2010) and yet, here we are still with a relative paucity of work in geography on ‘low’, ‘mainstream’, ‘popular’, or ‘vernacular’ cultural geography. What then, might it mean to (in some cases: continue to) do ‘popular’ cultural geography? One might argue – with Rose (2015) – that the first 20 something years of ‘new’ cultural geography are founded on readings: reading various landscapes and other spatial formations as texts – as the Duncan’s and others asked of us in the late 1980s (e.g. Cosgrove & Daniels, 1988; Duncan & Duncan, 1988). This, of course, speaks to a particular understanding of the medium and the expression of culture: a deliberative cogitation on particular constellations of meaning (of more-or-less stable ‘objects’). One might argue that this implicitly goes hand in hand with a particular aesthetics of literature: when asked to ‘read’ landscapes it is analogous to reading