Cultural studies, geography, and the mediation of disasters: Reflections on Burgess and Gold 40 years on

This forum to revisit a landmark edited collection serves as an important reminder to geographers that media and popular culture have been central to geographical scholarship for at least four decades. The book’s contributions underscore the significance of popular media for research in geography and the centrality of geographical considerations and concerns for the analysis of media texts, production and consumption practices. Communication can only occur across and indeed creates space, the locations of media production and consumption saturate contemporary everyday life, the mediation of places is both constitutive of their meaningfulness and a site of its ongoing contestation, and engagement with media offers important insights for many forms of geographical enquiry, including the study of development; racial, national, regional and domestic imaginaries; urban placemaking and change; and hazard and disaster management. In this article we take up two key issues raised by the volume in question that connect with our own work and with the wider geographical study of media. The first is the relationship between geography and cultural studies discussed by Burgess and Gold in their introductory chapter. The second concerns representations of disaster in media, which are explored in Liverman and Sherman’s contribution to the collection.