ABSTRACT With his band the Velvet Underground and over several decades as a solo musician and performer, Lou Reed was motivated by an artistic interest in observing, understanding, and empathizing with the people of New York City. Reed’s grounded approach to songwriting generated albums full of urban geographic stories. This paper examines the emotional geographies contained in Reed’s songs featuring characters based on gay, queer, and trans individuals who were a part of Reed’s music career and life. Using concepts from the disciplines of geography and psychology, the authors interpret the emotional stances of Reed’s lyrics and their association with urban spaces that were produced and inhabited by members of the gay, queer, and trans communities of New York. Reed’s song lyrics elicit emotions at different geographic scales, from body-world relations to private home spaces, public city spaces, spatial interactions across the metropolitan region, and the movements of people and phenomena into New York. The authors discuss the characters, spaces, and incidents portrayed in Reed’s songs in relation to the academic literature on gay, queer, and trans geographies published in the decades after their commercial release. The paper concludes with a contemplation of the empathic power of Reed’s song lyrics.

ABSTRACT In this article, I reflect on my three years working as a lecturer in the Fiji Islands and conducting ethnography on soccer history at the same time. With this period in my life fading in my memory since it took place a decade ago, I then reflect on postethnography, including short visits back to Fiji in 2017 and 2019. I recall various stories from my time in Fiji (2013–15) and then from my later two trips. I compare and contrast the time when I was fully committed to living and working in the island nation, integrating myself into the society, and blessing others through my research and charity (for want of a better word), and my time back on short visits when I had been “relegated” in my own and others’ minds to “just a tourist”. I explore the guilt, sense of loss and sense of disorientation on meeting old research participants now that my life had “moved on” (as had theirs), and we were no longer sharing life experiences.

ABSTRACT This article explores the visual and textual curation of local food in the popular media. Using a cross-case study design, I analyze the photographs and associated textual phrases for 662 posted made across three distinct edible Community (eC) social media pages throughout 2023. The theoretical domains of institutional logics and value narratives guide my exploration. Three themes are found to consistently characterize the visual curation of local food across the three eC social media sites: staged beauty, artistry, and abundance and opulence. These themes lead me to theorize concept gentrification as a process involving visual and textual curations that insidiously peripheralize prosocial concepts with roots in widespread accessibility and inclusivity and privilege aesthetics and market activities, thereby signaling exclusivity and higher brow consumption. The theoretical implications of concept gentrification are explored to include the potential for concept gentrification to serve as an early-stage indication of the emergence or spread of place gentrification.

ABSTRACT Midnight Oil, an Australian rock band active for more than 40 years, is as well-known for their political, social, and environmental stances as they are for their music. These concerns have included Aboriginal rights, nuclear proliferation, and climate change. This paper explores the lyrical content of fifteen albums to explore how the band’s lyrics use place names, evocative place description, and Australian vernacular terms – a musical approach by artists that I describe as place lyricism – to create for the listener an understanding of Australia, that though still limited to the experience of the band themselves, is fuller and more complete than portrayed in much popular culture.

ABSTRACT For over two decades, South Korean pop culture has occupied the Vietnamese' cultural lives as it has conquered numerous other markets, giving rise to the global cultural phenomenon of the Korean Wave, or Hallyu. While Hallyu has spread across Vietnam, businesses serving made-in-Korea or (mimicking) “Korean-style” products and services have also developed in many of its cities, including the capital, Hanoi. Tracing the “Hallyu spaces” which such businesses constitute, this article explores the extent and patterns of those spaces and how they fit into the day-to-day flows of Hanoi and its residents' consumerist lives. It focuses on two main areas of discussion: the kinds of Korean (or Korean-inspired) products and services on offer and the locations in which these are found. Using a combination of methods, including walking, participant observation, photo-taking, mapping, casual interviews, and digital ethnography, the study contributes to the scholarship on the urban spaces and consumption practices in Hanoi and the cultural exchange between Vietnam and South Korea. It reveals how Hallyu spaces add to Hanoi's experience economy as well as the conspicuous and seeping effects of Hallyu in urban Hanoi and Vietnam. Theoretically, the study advances the conceptualisation of “K-culture” and “global Koreanness” in Hallyu studies.

ABSTRACT The government of Russia’s Altai Republic encourages tourism for local socio-economic development. The year 2020 brought 2.2 million visitors to the Altai Republic, an ecologically pristine but economically depressed region, with a population of just 220,200. Ethnic Russians constitute a majority of the Altai Republic’s citizenry, but Indigenous groups make up 34 percent of the population. Using surveys and interviews, this study analyzed perceptions of tourism among four rural Indigenous groups in 2018–2019 concerning maintaining local culture, improving the standard of living, and preserving the environment. Survey participants generally did not agree that tourism helps them to maintain local culture or to improve the local standard of living, although interview respondents gave positive and negative viewpoints. Both those surveyed and those interviewed expressed overwhelming concern for the preservation of the natural environment and alarm regarding illegal and excessive hunting by outsiders.