Editorial: Geography in the world

Abstract

This editorial introduces a new initiative at Transactions, “Geography in the World,” which engages with some of the challenges and opportunities of the discipline today. It does so by staging a set of reflections from Geographers working in different contexts across the world. The editorial introduces the first collection gathered in this issue, and discusses some of the key themes posed by the contributions and the wider initiative. Transactions invites further contributions – as short commentaries or full papers – to “Geography in the World” from authors based in different national contexts.

Lost (in) space for dialogue: On the (abandoned) need for working papers in human geography

“…Although 'provincialising' perhaps is not the most accurate term here: editorial policies and publishing practices, in a way, need to be 'de-provincialised' and to reflect a wider set of international publishing traditions and scholarly concerns rather than resort to a very limited, so-called 'international', outlook that is essentially British. It is insufficient to acknowledge that the geographies of knowledge production are globally uneven and unequal if we do not open spaces of exchange and engagement with those facing different political realities and diverse epistemic and institutional histories of geographical research and teaching (McFarlane, 2022). Second, as noted by other scholars (Asai, 2020;Bergstrom, 2001;Coomes et al, 2017), the power game of the large, oligopolistic publishers (Larivière et al, 2015) has already affected the direction and forms of disciplinary publications and what is perceived as a 'valuable' outlet.…”

Post‐pandemic cities: An urban lexicon of accelerations/decelerations

“…Journals experimented with the use of open access for relevant research, the use of curated blogs, shorter articles, and new sections especially for early career academics, which together have accelerated the potential for less conventional styles of output alongside full academic papers. Another promising possibility is the recent call from this journal to ‘care‐fully’ develop new opportunities and spaces for collective exchange and engagement for more caring styles of scholarly transactions (see Bailey et al, 2023; McFarlane, 2021a). We also recognise the predominance of English language journals while working with a team chosen to explore the multiplicity of different contexts in which the post‐pandemic city is emerging.…”

Geography, area studies and Chinese world-writing

“…Such a project acknowledges the embeddedness of academic scholarship in a postcolonial moment, and challenges the parochialism and Euro-Americanism in ‘the geographical tradition’ (Craggs, 2019; McEwan, 1998). It redresses the epistemic hegemony by recovering previously marginalised sites/sights of geographical knowledge production, their place-based particularities, and context-contingent ‘world-writings’ (McFarlane, 2021; Müller, 2021). However, opening spaces for the complex and rich experiences and scholarship of different places does not assume the ‘innocence’ of postcolonial subjects, as they too may involve ‘racial’ and political hierarchies.…”