Forward cultural geographies

Since its inception as Ecumene some 25 years ago, cultural geographies has sought to be a forum for groundbreaking cultural work in geography and beyond. We write, as the four current editors, successors to founding editors Denis Cosgrove and James Duncan, along with subsequent editors Don Mitchell, Philip Crang, Mona Domosh, and Tim Cresswell, to forward that mission into our second quarter century and beyond.

We fly the flag of cultural geographies at a time when cultural approaches have become foundational to the discipline and beyond. This is a time not of struggle for (sub-)disciplinary territory, but rather one of broad reach, a reach that far transcends even disciplinary boundaries. Consistent with our heritage, and forwarding those traditions in our second quarter century, cultural geographies seeks to publish papers that span and bridge the approaches of the humanities, social sciences, and the arts; papers whose methodological innovation and articulacy buttress and indeed forward their vibrant empirical context; papers that demonstrate how the cultural is always political; papers that traverse novel conceptual terrain; papers emerging from embodied encounters, participatory approaches, and community connections; papers whose written form expresses the dynamism and creativity of all that is cultural in geography and beyond, even those that explore and support geographies in creative forms other than the written. This means that at cultural geographies we stand for, as we have always stood for, the most diverse and daring approaches.

Empirically grounded, our papers build from encounters across the globe to advance insights into not just the places where specific research is set, but significantly into the conceptual notions they engage. Methodologically articulate, papers in cultural geographies use both enduring and innovative approaches to research methods to explore the empirical world creatively and in full nuance, but also to ground claims. For articulate methods, whether qualitative or quantitative, innovative or enduring, serve to solidify research-based arguments, to buttress and advance conceptual claims. Pushing the boundaries and extending the creativity of research methods, papers in cultural geographies reveal how methodological articulacy serves as anchor to work that is at once empirical, theoretical, and political, and potentially also participatory and community engaged.

Indeed, part of the very weave of cultural geographies is the foundational understanding that the cultural is always political, just as the political is always cultural, leading to rich cross-hatchings with political themes and concerns. Transcendent examinations (spanning disciplines) have shown and will continue to show how divergent vectors of cultural-and-embodied difference are implicated in the inclusions/exclusions of citizenship, nationalism, borders, boundaries, and biographies, calling such demarcations into question and creating new understandings of political-cultural life; while gender and other dimensions of difference (including those that might be called ‘cultural’) continue to trouble the (Western) private/public dichotomy. Cultural geographies have contributed to the embodied, material, and emotional geographies of nationalism, the ‘war on terror’, and urban publics (among other ‘political’ themes). Such engagements affirm cultural geographies as a space where cultural and political geographies can and will meet up, interweave, and even tussle.

At the same time, cultural geographies will continue to be a venue for papers whose contribution lies primarily in conceptual and theoretical discussion and analysis. We seek to publish theoretical interventions regarding cultural geographical concerns, and conceptual and speculative pieces that further understanding and debate. At a time when some perceive a narrowing across human geography of venues for such discussion and speculation, cultural geographies will continue as a forum for work that focuses on particular writers, theorists, or ideas; for papers that seek to advance understanding of key concepts; and indeed for submissions that advance new conceptual groundings for cultural geography and cognate disciplines. In this way, we aim to pursue and enrich what has been a significant feature of the journal since its inception. cultural geographies is not wedded to any particular philosophical line or paradigm, rather we aim to publish leading-edge contributions ranging across a highly diverse conceptual landscape – we seek contributions that endeavor to urge forward conceptual understanding and theoretical debate across disciplines.

Nevertheless, as we enter our second quarter-century, in what certainly seems a time of profound political and environmental tumult, the most apposite response may often be to emphasize – as work in cultural geographies has so often done – conceptual-substantive hybrids that form both object of inquiry and framework of apprehension: among them affective atmospheres, planetary urbanization, more-than-human materialities, decolonization, and digital geographies – contributions that can meld empirical-conceptual engagements with methodological articulacy, and political-, embodied-, and community- groundings.

Indeed, the intellectual languages of Ecumene and cultural geographies are those of ‘junctures’ ‘convergences’ and ‘allegiances’. Where in the post-quantitative-revolution 20th century the journal fostered creative confluences between the humanities and social sciences, in the 21st century we forward an intensification of such intellectual bridgings, including those between geography and the arts, in encounters often participatory at multiple levels. We see and seek geographers working in collaboration with creative practitioners – from film-makers, to visual and performance artists – drawing on their own experience, or undertaking new training in practices as diverse as creative writing, photography, painting, taxidermy, and knitting. We see and seek encounters that transcend research-based enquiry to become fundamentally also transformative ‘doings’ of cultural geography, doings mirrored outside our discipline by the art world’s convergent engagements with practices such as mapping and exploration, and its interests in the spatial, and the environmental.

A vibrant way of navigating these rich convergences is and will be through attention to their geographies of production, consumption, and circulation. The variegated geobiographies of such creative and embodied practices span expressions – from offering a postscript to research (in a medium of dissemination for ideas evolved in research and expressed through, perhaps, poetry), but, increasingly also, playing an integral role from the outset of the research process, as part of a broader suite of research methods and (community-) engaged, embodied research practices. The geographies of such creative outputs are themselves diverse: some remain private, never reaching broader audiences yet cultivating an attentiveness to the world as they mobilize process, not product, as the point. In other works, disciplinary spaces (like journals) may be bypassed in favor of the walls of galleries, the stages of theatres, or the pages of poetry magazines. Remapping where we consume disciplinary knowledge in these ways reconstitutes its audiences. cultural geographies has and will continue to demonstrate how creative practices assemble new audiences, enrolling new publics who can engage and participate in the making of geographic knowledge.

At cultural geographies we seek to forward all such richly diverse and indeed daring engagements that will continue to yield critical insights, foster debate, and cultivate creative practices in method and expression. Looking forward to cultural geographies’ second quarter century, we invite you to join us in the journal’s future role in shaping conceptual, methodological, political, creatively expressive, and community-and-practice-engaged cultural geographies.