Abstract
As the new managing editor of Dialogues in Human Geography, I’d like to begin by first acknowledging the journal’s founding editor, Rob Kitchin, for his guiding vision in launching this journal and his tireless efforts serving as lead editor over the past decade. Fortunately, Rob will remain on the editorial team together with co-editors Ayona Datta and Jeremy Crampton as well as book review editors Lauren Rickards and Ugo Rossi. As one of the journal’s co-editors over the past two and a half years, I’ve seen first-hand how the editing of Dialogues in Human Geography is a collective dialogical endeavor, and I hope to build upon the existing strengths of the journal while also remaining open to new horizons.
One of the journal’s main strengths is its ‘forum’ format, which aims to foster constructive engagement between authors and commentators in order to stimulate dialogue and debate in human geography. While other geography journals occasionally publish article forums, Dialogues in Human Geography is unique in its use of forums as the modus operandi of the journal itself. At their best, such forums provide a space where new geographical ideas can be explored from multiple perspectives and disagreements can be articulated not with the expectation of reaching a consensus but rather clarifying both the intellectual and practical stakes involved in geographical debates.
In the current political climate, the stakes of scholarly discourse have acquired a growing sense of urgency. As Hawthorne and Heitz (2018: 151) have reminded us in a prior issue of this journal, scholarly dialogues ‘are not purely intellectual exercises’ alone, since they can have ‘profoundly material consequences’. In recent years, some scholars have used the call for ‘viewpoint diversity’ as an excuse to promote everything from colonial domination and the ‘ethics’ of empire to a revival of the eugenics movement (for a discussion of academic publishing ethics, see Sultana, 2018). Others have attempted to hoodwink the editors of scholarly journals—including at least one geography journal—by submitting fabricated data under false pretenses with the duplicitous aim of discrediting entire fields of study (Mangan, 2019). Such efforts to ‘hack’ and ‘weaponize’ academic publishing underscore the limits to scholarly dialogue and the need to uphold ethical codes of conduct in academic publications (Rose-Redwood et al., 2018).
Within this context, the curation of dialogue and debate in the pages of Dialogues in Human Geography depends, by necessity, on the professional and ethical judgment of the journal’s editorial team. To assist us in this process, we will be revamping the journal’s editorial board over the next year, and, while we welcome regular submissions to the journal, we also plan to call upon editorial board members to recommend potential topics and authors with the greatest potential to ‘set the agenda for future avenues of geographic thought, empirical research and pedagogy’ (Dialogues in Human Geography, 2019). Additionally, the current issue expands the journal's scope by including a film review forum, and we shall also periodically publish editorials on topics of contemporary relevance written by the editors, members of the editorial board, and other contributors to the journal. In doing so, I am particularly mindful of the historical and contemporary exclusions within the predominantly ‘white discipline’ of geography (Pulido, 2002), which have resulted in some voices being given a platform in scholarly journals more often than others. Yet I continue to be inspired by those Indigenous, Black, and Latinx geographers who are challenging the ongoing legacies of white supremacism in the discipline as well as those anti-racist and feminist geographers who are reshaping disciplinary norms to acknowledge that the time’s up for harassment at our national conferences and beyond.
Two decades into the 21st century, it is clear that there is no singular ‘agenda’ of geographical thought and praxis but rather a multiplicity of projects, trajectories, and ‘a simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (Massey, 2005: 9). Dialogues in Human Geography provides a forum—or, rather, a series of forums—in which to critically engage with the multiple trajectories of geographical research, and I look forward to working with the editorial team, contributors, and readers of the journal in extending the horizons of dialogues in human geography in exciting new directions.