Popular Communication

Journal overview

Aims and scope

Popular Communication publishes work from theoretical and empirical perspectives within the context of transnational and globalized popular culture and communication. It is an international journal of media and culture that publishes articles on all aspects of popular communication in everyday life, including legacy media and new media, advertising and consumer culture, games, music, film and television, fandom, and social media. Popular Communication engages with cultural forms and texts, artifacts, events, technologies, industries, policies and audiences/fans through critical methods and standpoints. Popular Communication interrogates these practices and phenomena in relationship to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class in a range of diverse political (economic), social, historical, and cultural contexts.

Popular Communication is especially interested in work that questions the meanings of the concepts of both 'the popular’ and 'communication’, research that explores the notion of 'unpopular communication’, and work that offers innovative forms of research method.We are particularly committed to publishing ground-breaking work in the following areas (although these are not exhaustive):

Local, national and global forms of political communication, both popular and unpopular
Transcultural/transnational and transmedia flows of legacy media and new media
Conspiracy theories, mis/disinformation and power in on and offline spaces
Media representations, and the problematics of communicating these
Fans and audiences’ use of modes of communication
Emergent digital spatialized media – e.g., VR, AR, and the Metaverse
Popular communication and media, ethics, and sustainability
Communication, media industries and issues of labor

Peer Review Policy

All articles undergo initial editorial screening. While articles in special issues are not peer reviewed, they are subject to rigorous editorial review; all other articles undergo double-anonymous peer review.

Publication office: Taylor & Francis, Inc., 530 Walnut Street, Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106.