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Because research on the publication practices of academic geographers has been limited to the quantification of journal articles cited in easily searchable databases such as Thomson Reuters' Web of Science or Elsevier's Scopus, the question remains whether journals that are not indexed by these databases flourish or perish under the increasing pressure to publish in outlets with the highest impact factors. To answer this question, we have compiled a database with the complete bibliographies of all Belgian professors that have been working in Belgium in the field of human geography over the last 40 years. Based on our quantitative analysis of 810 articles published in 304 different journals, we come to the conclusion that human geographers from the Dutch-speaking north of the country are currently publishing more in English-language journals and in journals indexed by the Web of Science than their colleagues in the seventies or the eighties, but less in the Dutch and the French languages and in Belgian geographical journals. In the French-speaking south of the country, this evolution is less pronounced, but still present. Even though we applaud the tendency to publish in English and in Web of Science journals because it increases the academic rigour of scholarly research, we are afraid that it hampers the role of academic geography in geography education and society as a whole.

While policy makers in different parts of the world are worried about the supposedly negative consequences of spatial concentrations of ethnic minorities and/or disadvantaged people, researchers continue the debate about the desirability and feasibility of social mix. In this article, we add to this literature by focusing on the often neglected, but crucial practices and discourses of the privileged in urban and suburban neighborhoods. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 74 white, middle class residents of eight different neighborhoods of the Ghent urban region in Belgium, we demonstrate that few middle class whites actually want to live in a mixed neighborhood. We also make it clear that those living in diversity do not necessarily take up the roles they are expected to take up by the advocates of social mix policies. Drawing on these findings, we propose to broaden the research agenda of studies on segregation and social mix.

Governments all over the world try to influence in one way or another the residential mobility of their citizens. This article takes the vantage point of why Belgians do not want to change residence a lot and how they actually succeed in doing this. We claim that the framework of a housing pathways approach helps to get to grips with the historically built-up archive of normalizing discourses and practices related to housing and diverse other domains of life. Our in-depth interviews with 67 residents reveal that normalizing discourses and practices on becoming and remaining a stable home-owner mainly support the two pillars of Belgian housing policy (home ownership and commuting) even when these practices and discourses further endorse ecological and accessibility problems. Policies that successfully want to change the relocation practices of people do have to take this archive seriously.