Introduction: Popular Culture, Media Engagement, and Democracy

This special issue on "Popular Culture, Media Engagement, and Democracy" is the result of research coordinated from the Center for Popular Culture Studies (PoCuS) at Linnaeus University.PoCuS is a new and growing research environment, started by Tommy Gustafsson and Mariah Larsson in 2020, which aims to bring together scholars from across disciplines and faculties with a focus on popular culture in order to promote research, education, and collaboration with society.Popular culture and modern liberal democracy developed together during the 20 th century, and the connections between the two are manifold.Most obvious among them are perhaps those actors who have become politicians, such as the U.S President Ronald Reagan (1981Reagan ( -1989) ) and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (2019-).There are, however, several other examples of such connections, including the film The Birth of a Nation (1915) leading to the resurrection of Ku Klux Klan in the USA, and the effects of Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson dancing with the cow Doris in the children's television show Abrakadabra in 2001.Besides its great economic, cultural, technological, and industrial impact on society in the 20 th and 21 st centuries, popular culture has also exerted an impact -both imagined and actual -on peoples' experiences, understandings, and engagement of society, citizenship, and the world.Many of the ideas about popular culture up to this point have been shaped by the dynamics of the 20 th century.During this time, a negative understanding of mass culture, mass media, and mass entertainment was born out of a need to understand the rise of fascism in the decades leading up to the Second World War.A more positive reinterpretation of popular culture placing emphasis on active consumers only took hold in the late 20 th century.Since the 1980s, popular culture has expanded in reach and diversity due to technological and demographic changes.Today, social media is an integral part of popular culture, and with it, a much larger possibility of permutations and transformations, quotation and references, fragmentation, disinformation, and propaganda has developed.As digital technologies and internet algorithms change the conditions of popular culture consumption and engagement, we need better to understand not only how people engage with popular culture but also why they do so, and why such engagement can take different social, political, and activist expressions.Although there is no lack of research on popular culture and democracy, the great majority of this emanates from the Social Sciences, which historically has been characterized