Whose geography do we review?

Abstract

Since 2020, in response to community organizing around racial injustice and highly visible police killings of unarmed Black people, especially but not exclusively in the United States, prominent institutions in many sectors all over the world have made public commitments to correcting longstanding social and especially racial inequities and injustices.Academic publishers and editors for academic journals also responded, as is evident in Wiley's "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) commitments in 2020, and our publisher's creation of a dedicated DEI team. Editorial statements from prominent journals in our cognate disciplines also stand as evidence of this trend; for instance, editors at Organization pledge to accompany the "ethical and political momentum" generated by racial justice organizing in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis (Mir & Zanoni, 2021, p. 3). Some critical scholars are skeptical of these public commitments, noting that, after Floyd's murder, statements of allyship were often crafted in a way that obscured exactly how institutions or organizations would commit to efficacious solidarity, and that public statements of commitment to social justice arguably converge with an array of affirmative and "positive" messages in advertising that "(reconfigure) oppression in terms of aspiration" and maintain neoliberal commonsense (Kanai & Gill, 2021, p. 12). As section editors for Geography Compass, we hope we can navigate the fraught context of public-facing commitments by situating our own in disciplinary debates and identifying practicable and actionable ways to address systemic inequities, injustices, and exclusions in our editorial work.Geography Compass publishes review articles that summarize the state of the field, discuss recent research around a debate, offer a novel perspective on a topic of interest to geographers, or provide a look beyond disciplinary boundaries to draw lessons for the discipline, typically with an emphasis on human geography. 1 As section editors for this review journal, we accordingly ask the question of our title-"Whose geography do we review?"-in at least two senses. On one hand, at stake is how we as editors can work with authors to review existing literature in a way that might challenge past and ongoing erasure or marginalization of minoritized people or perspectives. On the other, the question prompts us to consider from whom we commission articles, reviews, and contributions to editorial work-who, in that sense, is provided opportunity to describe extant tendencies in geographical scholarship and define priorities for future work under the mantle of geography as a discipline. The question of our title can accordingly be asked differently, as a question of what practices and norms within our editorial work can or should delimit whose geography counts as worthy of review.As we scrutinize the practices and norms of our editorial work for what they might reflect about a commitment to, or a neglect of, social justice, we are mindful of disciplinary debat...

Trajectories of translation

“…One theme across many of these bodies of work is the need to work within and across difference beyond simply increasing representation and to think more carefully about how different types of knowledge are (de)valued within our institutional structures (Faria et al, 2019; Roy, 2020). Translation within the context of the nonaggregate community is one way in which we can try to work towards a system of valuation of knowledges across infinite types of difference (including those less commonly discussed such as neurodivergence), complementing calls for changes to how specific bodies and ideas are (de)valued in academia (e.g., Crane et al, 2023).…”

“…For example, Rosenman et al (2020) argue that meaningful engagement should involve actually “upending previous forms of recognition and valuation” (527) and not just interacting with more diverse scholars. In addition to a plethora of work that has discussed necessary structural changes to how our work is done (Crane et al, 2023; Faria et al, 2019; Mountz et al, 2015; Peake and Kobayashi, 2002), we offer some complementary thoughts on how translation can foster a praxis in geography that creates space for challenging how we value some forms of knowledge production over others.…”