Abstract
To start this new year and new volume of Society and Space, we have some editorial team changes to announce. First, Bobby Benedicto and Lauren Martin have stepped down after three years as our review and open site editors. They brought extraordinary commitment and dedication to these roles, and their imprint on the Society and Space project will be lasting. In addition to soliciting and editing a steady stream of excellent content for the site during their tenure with us, they played vital roles in redesigning and relaunching the site in 2016, an effort which transformed its form and style and expanded its audience and reach.
We offer Bobby and Lauren our heartfelt thanks. We are very pleased that they will remain involved with Society and Space as board members (see below), and warmly welcome our new review and open site editors, Charmaine Chua and Brian Jordan Jefferson.
Charmaine is assistant professor of politics at Oberlin College. Her research interests are in global political economy, postcolonial theory, and the technologies and logistics of racial capitalism and border imperialism. She has published in outlets such as Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (as guest editor of volume 36, issue 4, a special issue on ‘Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics’), Historical Materialism, Political Geography, and the Journal of Narrative Politics, and is currently working on a book manuscript on the just-in-time politics of supply chains between the United States and the Asia Pacific. She is also a member of the editorial collective for Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, and blogs at The Disorder of Things.
Brian is assistant professor of geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work lies at the intersections of urban theory, racial capitalism, and science and technology studies and utilizes a mixed methods approach that integrates critical social theory, discourse analysis, and content analysis. He has published on the relations between urban restructuring, mass criminalization, and digital criminal justice technologies in outlets such as Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Antipode, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (see his article ‘Digitize and punish: Computerized crime mapping and racialized carceral power in Chicago’ in volume 35, issue 5), and Urban Geography.
We also have changes to our Editorial Board to announce. A sincere thank you goes out to our outgoing board members for their contributions to the journal and open site. They are: Teo Ballvé, Joe Bryan, Brenda Chalfin, Rosemary-Claire Collard, Melinda Cooper, Anja Karlsson Franck, Ilse Helbrecht, Caleb Johnston, Nadim Khoury, Ashok Kumar, Loren Landau, Angela Last, Francis Nyamnjoh, Rupal Oza, Álvaro Reyes, Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago, Kendra Strauss, Zoe Todd, Helen Wilson, and Woon Chih Yuan.
Our new Editorial Board is made up of the following scholars, with whom we look forward to working during their three-year terms:
Aren Aizura, University of Minnesota, USA Bobby Benedicto, McGill University, Canada Gautam Bhan, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, India Adam Bledsoe, Florida State University, USA Deborah Cowen, University of Toronto, Canada Michelle Daigle, University of British Columbia, Canada Ayona Datta, King’s College London, UK Treva C. Ellison, Dartmouth University, USA Nick Estes, University of New Mexico, USA Caroline Faria, University of Texas at Austin, USA Camilla Hawthorne, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA Beste İşleyen, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Anja Kanngieser, University of Wollongong, Australia Laleh Khalili, SOAS University of London, UK Marisol LeBrón, University of Texas at Austin, USA Agnieszka Leszczynski, Western University, Canada Lauren Martin, Durham University, UK Malini Ranganathan, American University, USA Melanie Samson, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa Rashad Shabazz, Arizona State University, USA Eric Stanley, University of California, Berkeley, USA Julie Sze, University of California Davis, USA You Yenn Teo, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Marie Thompson, University of Lincoln, UK Yvonne Te Ruki-Rangi-O-Tangaroa Underhill-Sem, University of Auckland, New Zealand Sebastián Ureta, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile Hairong Yan, Hong Kong Polytechnic, Hong Kong Megan Ybarra, University of Washington, USA Austin Zeiderman, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Collectively, our editors and board members bring knowledge of a wide range of contexts around the globe, and expertise in many fields of study, including: anti-racist geographies; colonialism and imperialism; intersectional feminist thought; queer and trans politics; Black geographies; Latinx geographies; Indigenous geographies; prisons and policing; surveillance; digital geographies; urban studies; critical development studies; critical logistics and infrastructure; political ecology; racial capitalism, science and technology studies, and critical migration studies. Thus, we especially look forward to fostering conversations in these areas.
Finally, with this new team in place, and to accentuate where we aim to collectively go, we rewrote our aims and scope. Here is the new text on our masthead: We seek contributions that investigate and challenge the ways that modes and systems of power, difference and oppression differentially shape lives, and how those modes and systems are resisted, subverted and reworked. We welcome work that is empirically engaged and furthers a range of critical epistemological approaches, that pushes conceptual boundaries and puts theory to work in innovative ways, and that consciously navigates the fraught politics of knowledge production within and beyond the academy.