Making impact strange/making strange impact

It has been almost a year since we published our re-launch issue, 24.1–2. Already in pandemic mode when the issue was published in early May 2020, we as City Editors worked hard to make this happen. This work and achievement were meant to be shared and celebrated. Yet, there was an eerie feeling that hovered over our virtual event, which consisted mostly of brief social media outputs featuring the articles. This feeling hasn’t quite been left behind even after the intimate session with many Collective members where we all just shared how we were doing after our respective geographies implemented contingency measures, including lockdown. We were grateful for the attention and sharing but remained attuned to the ways in which long-standing inequalities in the publishing world, and beyond, were becoming further entrenched. We believe our work was in line with the critical and radical politics required for this moment even though we had not anticipated it by name. Yet this moment, this pandemic, has made strange keywords like impact, productivity, prominence, amongst others. They contrast with the continuation of moments that we have lived, containing anxiety, overwork, fear, love, illness, caring, loneliness, exhaustion, and mutual aid. Moments of contradiction.

Words like impact, productivity, visibility, exposure, and other synonyms have become commonplace in academia; they became ordinary, part of the quotidian academic hustle that fosters academic competition leading to quantity over quality. This academic market champions subjects who have the ability and resources to perform the script that these keywords entail. These subjects sometimes become ‘academic celebrities’ (Walsh 2019), an institution in its own right which is generated and sustained by the ‘managerial universities’ such as those in the United Kingdom which operate under the Research Excellence Framework. Our perception is that the pandemic has made these keywords strange. This strangeness was highlighted because the performance of these keywords has always been undergirded by care and care work. We noted the sharp backlash against academics capitalising on the pandemic, feeding into the industrial printing press machine. There seemed to be a collective response fraught with a repudiation of publications that sought to exploit the pandemic and its associated pain and suffering while we were (still are) going through it all, through moments of contradiction evinced in the contrasting keywords we offer above.

We want to use this space to reflect back on the past year, in particular about how the pandemic has shaped our goals and our work in the academic publishing world. In the opening lines of the re-launch issue, we affirmed our commitment to reworking our role from within the publishing process, to address the lack of access to our journal. For us, this is a moral imperative given that the journal itself has always strived to challenge and propose radical urban futurities. This is what we inherited and we agree with Derrida (1994) that inheritance always implies a responsibility. The challenge before us is learning to navigate the ever-changing world of academic publishing while still staying true to our commitment to publish critical and radical scholarship that contests, blurs and pushes the boundaries of the urban. For us, this implies the need to listen to—as well as to disidentify, to work on and against (Muñoz 1999)—the strangeness of those keywords that are inexorably linked to knowledge production as competition, as business, as part of an insular, self-referential academy that refuses to engage with its complicity in the inequities and inequalities of the urbanising world.

The horizontal structure of the editorial team, including City Editors and City Collective, has remained constant. After accomplishing the goal of relaunching the journal, four editors decided to step back and allow new members to step in and gain editorial experience. They are Pushpa Arabindoo, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia, Michele Lancione, and now Antonis Vradis. Combined, they had over forty-five years of service to the journal, and three remained part of the City Collective. We miss the intensity of our work together, and we are thankful for their brilliance as scholars and as colleagues in bringing us to this point. The labour-intensive posts of City Editor were always meant to rotate, both to share the burden of hard graft that running a journal involves, but also to continually refresh and renew City’s vision and continue to offer the opportunity to promising scholars, just as that those of us who have now been involved with the journal for many years valued so much. This is Bob Catterall’s legacy, our inheritance, and now our shared responsibility. Where else are early career scholars given so much opportunity to contribute to and shape the urgent debates of our times? The new editors joining the team are Brandi T. Summers, Lindsay Sawyer, myself (Ulises Moreno-Tabarez), and now Yimin Zhao. Each brings unique experiences and perspectives to City: Together, we are learning what it means to do editorial work during a pandemic. Above all, this has meant learning to care for ourselves, our loved ones, our activist comrades, each other, and our editorial practice, as these intimate and social geographies blend into one another. In this vein, the lifeblood of our labour builds on keywords such as conviviality, collaboration, social reproduction, dialogic, and mutuality.

Focusing on care and care work is crucial to our editorial ethic, and this pandemic has highlighted the inequalities in the space to think and theorise as much as in the materialities of risk, responsibility, and survival. We saw prominent scholars publish pandemic-related literature before some countries had even implemented contingency measures. This pattern continued, with journals reporting an increase of submissions from men. This caused a considerable amount of concern given that caring responsibilities are so unevenly distributed. The gendered dynamics of care and care work are compounded by intersecting power dynamics concerning race and ethnicity, health and disability, career status, and associated uneven levels of precarity, and economic instability, as well as different levels of social support and social demands. Throughout this process, universities around the world have added to an already stressful situation by implementing budget cuts and redundancies, with more in the works. This institutional violence impacts who has time to write, to review papers, to engage with the publishing process.

In this process, the critiques have focused on the final product, the published articles. However, our experience extends this critique about the reproduced gender inequalities to the peer-reviewing stage. We, like other journals such as the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, have worked to centre research experiences of contributors who have been afflicted by these power imbalances. Our current issue features early career researchers, women, and scholarship examining under-represented geographies. We continue to incorporate voices beyond the academy that also pose challenges to the academy. Beyond these proactive practices trying to correct inequalities, we want to issue an urgent call to academics to critically reflect on our positionalities, privileges, and responsibilities and perform corrective actions in the face of the structural inequalities that are exacerbated by this pandemic. We want to work with scholars interested in responding to this call, to help us build a more just editorial collective ethic with special emphasis on the reviewing stage of the publication process.

This editorial ethic also requires attention to methods and methodologies, the cornerstone to challenging intersectional power dynamics. We appreciate and welcome work that engages deeply not just with the construction of the scale called the urban, but, more importantly, with the lives of humans and nonhumans which can enable or disable the building of autonomous and collective lifeways. This includes a range of methods within critical traditions, such as advocating for the construction of socially just urban spacetimes or deconstructing scales that maintain hierarchies intensifying uneven human health experiences. In other words, we are working to build an editorial ethic that abolishes those methodologies that in themselves set up or reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and power. Most recently this has involved the rejection of articles engaging in what we feel are tourist-like qualitative methods–‘tourist ethnographies’, not to be confused with engaged ethnographies of tourism. These methods superficially engage with colonial histories and intersectionalities, but on a fundamental level, they fail to reflect on and challenge the deep inequalities embedded in the ethnographic process itself and the privilege of academics in relation to the slow and sometimes spectacular violence experienced by their research subjects.

In practical terms, this entails an engaged editorial process that is part of our practice of care and care work. In addition to the amazing reviewers who have gracefully volunteered their time and effort into shaping the articles we feature, we also work with each author to push their arguments to what we believe will have the most critical impact on a variety of audiences. This can sometimes be a contentious process, but we hope the quality of the work published and the wide variety of voices reflected in the journal’s pages speak well for this process.

Throughout this journey, so much is owed to our Corresponding Editor, Anna Richter. Her work involves balancing a plurality of voices and speaking to different and differing audiences. Her supportive and collaborative working style has proved instrumental in developing our own editorial voices through critical and reflective praxis. She makes it her job to listen and stay attuned to the different arguments and perspectives, the necessary tensions and challenges, from authors, editors, reviewers and scholars more widely, all this while framing these events as dialogue and collective learning. This kind of care and care work characterises solidarity, keywords that are continually being distanced from one another through state and market forces. Here, we are pointing to how building solidarity involves care and care work, two practices that are curtailed with state austerity policies and the marketisation, dehumanisation of care work. These are the same forces responsible for budget cuts, redundancies, and the entrenchment of inequalities in the publishing world. They hinder the kind of solidarity we try to build with other City Editors, City Collective, our generous reviewers, authors, and the kinds of questions and answers we are able to provide for our readers.

In our re-launch issue, we noted the questions posed in the first editorial of City. What is a city in the late twentieth century? What could and should it be? When? Where? How? We still ask these questions, altering the temporal frame to the twenty-first century and its new challenges. The pandemic and other related environmental calamities, present and future, are just the beginning. The questions persist: how do we further build an editorial ethic that speaks to these existential threats? How do we work on and against the knowledge production industry which reinforces a priori notions of scale? How do we play this game that we are entwined with where the work of our reviewers, authors, and ourselves is judged by metrics, statistics and numbers. unable to capture their value? Our hope is that City publishes work that theorises the world in order to change it, that engages with participants as comrades and partners, but how best do we do that?

There are multiple forces at work that threaten to redefine the pandemic not as a crisis but as a chronic problem with which we must learn to live. The difference between these keywords, crisis vs chronic problem, is of political significance. It is impossible to avoid headlines that frame this pandemic as the tip of the iceberg, as a dress rehearsal for the inevitable apocalyptic pandemic which will eradicate humans. This kind of rhetoric is prevalent in mainstream media, it serves multiple purposes, one of which includes a rhetorical shift from a crisis to a chronic problem. As critical scholars, we have a responsibility to bring the pandemic into crisis, a chronic problem does not solve for the inadequate responses we are experiencing the world over. On one hand, it is important to maintain the crisis framework in our analyses using rigorous methods to make forceful demands on governments and other related power structures to respond with the urgency necessary to address the pandemic with extraordinary measures. A chronic problem, on the other hand, minimises the crisis and its associated pain and suffering, it ups the ante, increases the threshold for heartbreak and trauma, and normalises death while offering comparisons to a bleaker future that will not come to pass if we are able to maintain crisis critically.

Maintaining a crisis critically means being attuned to the ways in which a crisis can be open to capture by capitalist interests. This is indeed a threat, and with this threat, risk becomes synonymous with “crisis opportunism” and other forms of capital accumulation (Madden 2020). But risk also drives action and activism (Emejulu and Bassell 2020) and so we wonder: how do we work on and against the energy that is driven to exploit the pandemic as a resource for career development, that is driven to optimal productivity and exhaustion leaving little space or energy to consider healthier values such as collaboration and solidarity, and more equitable relations with research participants? Is stopping production of the journal politically viable in a political world that operates on signs and signifiers to gain legibility and sensibility, as in the possibility to be sensed/read? How do we continue to make strange keywords like impact productivity, visibility, exposure, and prominence, while still signalling towards abolitionist and emancipatory praxes? We don’t have all the answers, but we insist on posing these persistent questions, to articulate them, to breathe oxygen into them, to care for them because they continue to mean something we value. They continue to guide our collective editorial practices which make critical reflections and methodologies the core of the conversation and debate.

We wanted to take a moment to also return to the ambitions laid out in our relaunch issue (Gibbons et al. 2020), which we still hope to realise even as we recognise that the burdens of the pandemic have forced some of them into a more distant future.

To borrow a phrase from AbdouMaliq Simone, we want you to be part of the City yet to come. We are relaunching the journal so that it can be a home for new urban ideas and arguments that have not yet been born. We are planning exciting projects to further shake things up, including cross-pollination across languages, journals and countries, with more open-access content; as well as revamping our website to build on the interviews, reviews, rapid response features, audio-visual content and dialogues to create new forms and engage an ever wider audience within and beyond the academy. We are also working towards the creation of City-run workshops and summer schools, to be held in urban spaces beyond the island where many of us Editors live. We want to work with contributors and readers in cities across the world and, in this spirit, to repopulate the Editorial board. For that we need you.

Despite the challenges of this past year we have accomplished some—and some remains yet to do. And so, we want to reiterate the point we made in the relaunch editorial (Gibbons et al. 2020):

We welcome your feedback on everything we have done so far and, most importantly, we want you to become part of the journal and work with us to make it better, stronger, braver—to strengthen its collaborative and critical intent. The Collective is open and invites you in.