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.
In this article, we discuss the recent success of extreme right politicians in the Flemish countryside. Because the Vlaams Belang, the dominant extreme right-wing party in Flanders, plays to racist attitudes and everyday fears, we study the interrelations between the rise of the extreme right, racism and a spatialized and racialized culture of fear. Based on a multi-level analysis of spatial variations of racism and a qualitative analysis of focus group interviews on fear of crime, we suggest that a rural or suburban vote for the extreme right Vlaams Belang has to be understood as a protest vote against the racialization and the insecurity of the central cities and as an anticipatory vote that has to stop the imagined infection of the 'white' and 'safe' countryside with urban 'diseases' like crime and foreigners.
Public space and public art Over the last two decades, social and cultural geographers have broadened and deepened their interest in art (Hawkins 2012). While geographers used to be mainly interested in the spatial imaginaries deployed in artworks, they have also started to focus on the spatialities of its production (Neate 2012), consumption (Cresswell 1992) and exchange (Molotch and Treskon 2009). Inspired by the burgeoning fields of visual studies and non-representational geographies, geographers have realized that art should not always be viewed through the eyes of a detached scholar, but considered in the context of embodied emotions and material practices (Hawkins 2010a, Daya 2011). For this reason, they have expanded their methodological toolbox to encompass new approaches to the geographies of art (
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