Popular stories, in unprecedented times

When the annual symposium of the Popular Culture Research Centre (Auckland University of Technology) was held virtually in July 2020 – from which many of the articles in this issue came – we did not imagine that, when we were editing these pieces more than a year later, the world would not only still be in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic, but that the locations from which we were working as editors would again be in lockdown from new outbreaks. At a time of such unprecedented experiences, the consideration of popular culture has proven to be even more important in making sense of the world.