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Notes
1. See also Horton (Citation2018) for a similar, more specialised list of popular cultural icons which have been absent from recent geographical work with children and young people.
2. Searches were carried out in May 2018. Items included here have either: (i) never been mentioned anywhere in the journal; or (ii) only mentioned once or twice in a fleeting, incidental comment amid a discussion of something else.
3. Neither the tech or record company have been mentioned. However, there have been 18 mentions of actual or metaphoric apples.
4. I am not counting mentions in Horton (Citation2010) which called for further research on iconic examples of children and young people’s popular cultures.
5. For the avoidance of doubt, non-alphabetical runs of names in the list are intentional popular cultural references. Well done if you can identify any of these.
6. Ironically only mentioned in Kinsley’s (Citation2016) critique that geographers have tended to ‘aspire to an “unbearable lightness” and not “fifty shades” of cultural geography’.
7. Last mentioned in 2004.
8. Since this paper was drafted, he has been mentioned, briefly, in a few new papers. But still, I think the point stands that it is remarkable that he did not figure in the journal until late 2018.
9. Since you ask, they are Chicago (Mathews, Citation2010), Hurt Locker (Aitken, Citation2012), and Lord of the Rings (Anderson, Citation2013 – perhaps tellingly in a Special Issue on ‘marginalia in research’). A further 12 titles were fleetingly, and sometimes incongruously, mentioned in the context of something else.
10. Both adjusted for, and unadjusted for, inflation. Yes, I spent far too long doing this.
11. Psy’s Gangnam Style (Wilkinson, Citation2017) and the Beatles (Boland, Citation2010; Milburn, Citation2017), respectively.
12. Wilkinson (Citation2017) on Psy’s Gangnam Style, again.
13. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Shaw, Citation2010), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (Shaw & Sharp, Citation2013) and Grand Theft Auto (Thorogood, Citation2018) (perhaps suggesting a tendency to focus on lurid, violent, sensationalised forms of gaming? I am not an expert though. Please don’t quote me on this.)
14. V.S. Naipaul, William Golding, Salman Rushdie, Roddy Doyle, Arundhati Roy, J.M. Coetzee and Margaret Atwood. Notably, these authors were cited 10–40 years after the publication of their Booker-winning novel. Also, no winner since 2000 has ever been mentioned in the journal.
15. Henri Bergson, William Golding, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Doris Lessing and Bob Dylan. A further 12 Nobel Laureates have been fleetingly and incidentally cited elsewhere.
16. The landscape artist Richard Long (Morris and Cant, Citation2006; Ramsden, Citation2017). Three others (Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing, Grayson Perry) were very briefly and incidentally mentioned in other papers.
17. For example, social media platforms such as a WhatsApp, Reddit and Sina Weibo have only been mentioned fleetingly once; Snapchat and Pinterest have only been mentioned in Rose’s (Citation2016) call for more research on digital cultures; QQ, WeChat, VKontakte, Taringa, Linkedin and many others have never been mentioned. Technologies for delivering media content such as iTunes, Netflix and Spotify have thus far only been briefly mentioned, once each. All manner of apps, games and memes have never been mentioned in the journal. As a case in point, I still direct undergraduate students to Holloway and Valentine’s (Citation2001) paper on family ICT usage as a key resource for understanding the geographies of digital and online media. Latterly, it has become clear that students find the language, technologies, assumptions, norms and practices articulated in the paper to be entirely alien, olde worlde and bizarre.