Greetings from COVID-19 isolation! All of this sheltering-in-place existence has me thinking more than ever about place: our relationship to it, and what happens to us when so much of the way we typically interact with it is upended. While this has undoubtedly disrupted many of your research plans for the coming months, I expect it will also lead to some interesting and creative thinking about people, culture, and place, and I am curious to see how our field develops in the coming months and years.
Our next issue will be our long-gestating special issue of essays on the collision between theory and the field – tales of researchers who took one set of ideas into the field and came away from their encounter with messy reality with decidedly different ideas.
Part of the mark of a good researcher is, indeed, a willingness to be open to the unexpected. In this vein, this issue marks the debut of a new periodic section called “Learning from … .” This section consists of essays discussing inspiration geographic research derived from non-conventional sources. How have you been influenced in the way you do or think about geography by writers, creators, activists, thinkers, and doers outside of the realm of traditional academia? Our first essay in this series is Gregory Veeck’s reflection on the influence of master interviewer and journalist Studs Terkel on his own work. If you have some non-conventional inspirations of your own, consider submitting an essay; this will be one of the choices available on our online submission portal when submitting a new piece.
In addition to this new addition, we have two other ongoing periodic sections for alternative approaches to cultural geography:
Creative Mappings: Creative Mappings are works that are not standard academic articles, but rather are innovative reflections on and ways of practicing cultural geography: essays from the field, photographic or cartographic essays, unconventional maps, short stories or visual art, animations, or philosophical explorations. Consider this list a starting point, not a prescriptive list; anything that provides a different way of looking at people and place, at geographic scholarship and thinking, or are themselves creative works with a strong geographic bent, are welcome.
Dialogues: The Dialogues section consists of back-and-forth informal discussions over a particular contentious issue or theme. Send suggestions for these to me at [email protected].
If you have questions about any of these, or would like to propose ideas for any of these special sections, feel free to contact me at [email protected].