Social & Cultural Geography at 20 years: looking back, thinking forward

The publication of this issue marks an exciting moment in the life of Social & Cultural Geography. In celebrating its 20^th year, as befits an anniversary of this kind, we want to take this opportunity to reflect on what the journal has achieved during this time and provide some suggestions for what its future might look like. Social & Cultural Geography was founded at the turn of the millennium by Rob Kitchin and a team of dedicated geographers who recognised that social and cultural geography was one of most vibrant arenas of geographical research but were concerned that it did not have a specialised outlet for communication and debate. Looking back, the original editorial team envisaged that the journal would provide an ideal ‘middle ground’ between highly specialised journals such as Cultural Geographies (or Ecumene, as it was then) and more broad ranging journals such as Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Since then, the journal has grown from strength to strength. In the first year, 16 articles were published in two issues and the volume was only 250 pages long. In 2017, 50 articles were published across eight issues of 1112 pages. In spite of this remarkable growth, the overall remit of the journal has remained consistent. From the outset, the journal has been committed to publishing the very best theoretically informed empirical social and cultural geographical research.

But what of the social and the cultural? As the contributors to the very first issue made clear, the journal was founded to combine the ‘critical’ ethos of social geography and its concern for matters of inequality, oppression and exclusion, with the concerns of ‘new’ cultural geography for power, representation and materiality. Yet even from the outset, this coupling of the social with the cultural raised many a quizzical eyebrow about their perceived relationship. As Smith (2000, p. 25) pointed out in one of the opening commentaries, the founding of the journal was seen as an important recombination of two parts of the discipline that he saw had ‘divergent fates’, noting the challenges faced by social geography and the parallel resurgence of cultural geography. The commentary by Smith et al. (2011) expanded on this suspicion, highlighting just how emotive and passionate this debate has been. Of course, the boundary between ‘critical’ social geography and the ‘new’ cultural geography has never been clear cut, as Brown and Wilson (2009) reminded us in their 10-year anniversary editorial. Indeed, as Cresswell emphasises, ‘the social is just as important as the cultural and, in fact, entirely inseparable from it’ (Cresswell, 2010, p. 172). Yet the social and the cultural are not and have never been stable objects. They are approaches that are constantly being re-fashioned by our ‘communities of practice’, as Nayak (2011) suggests. Thus, since the journal’s inception two decades ago, what counts as both ‘the social’ and ‘the cultural’ have been hotly debated and the parameters of these terms have changed markedly. Social & Cultural Geography remains perfectly positioned to explore these vitalising tensions.

Vitalising tensions that insist on the inseparability of the social and the cultural are borne out in recent debates that have taken place in this journal. Over the past five years, special issues have been devoted to exploring: care in times of austerity; geographical research with vulnerable groups; strange encounters; transnational adoption; vegetal politics; public religion and urban space in Europe; knowledge of excess; and gendered spaces of commoditised care. This inventory demonstrates both the diversity of work that has preoccupied social and cultural geographers of late as well as signalling some of the significant issues that have risen to prominence demanding social and cultural geographical analysis. It also reminds us that, 20 years on, the world remains a place of tensions that are often felt as less-than-vitalising. Global inequality and lack of economic opportunity; climate change; habit and biodiversity loss; religious conflict; displacement of people through war and famine; violent contestation over resources; technological change and unemployment; financial crises and austerity; and food and water security are just some of the most pressing challenges that demand our collective attention. We are faced with these challenges at the same time as the status of academic truth claims are coming under renewed contestation through the rise of new forms of regressive populism. This palpable change in public mood in some places serves as a reminder that this is not a time for complacency. The conditions set by the progressive wins of the past are no longer assured, and the liberties gained perhaps feel more fragile than we might want to admit. But neither is this a time for easy answers. As Foucault reminds us in relation to the challenge of grappling with the complexity of events, ‘the problem is at once to distinguish among events, to differentiate the networks and levels to which they belong, and to reconstitute the lines along which they are connected and engender one another’ (1980, p. 114). Such complexity clearly demands innovative social and cultural geographical thought.

Thinking forward from this moment, we are excited about speculating how Social & Cultural Geography might evolve to probe, document and analyse the pressing social and cultural complexities of our evolving worlds. Most immediately, from 2019, the journal will be based in the southern hemisphere for the first time, and we look forward to using this opportunity to broaden its geographical representation of authorship and readership. Whilst retaining its steadfast commitment to the plurality of social and cultural geographical approaches, there are a number of developments that we are particularly keen to nurture. First, given the journal’s founding remit for empirical research, we would like to see renewed attention devoted to exploring the practical, conceptual and ethical complexities of social and cultural geographical methods and fieldwork. Second, and relatedly, we are excited about the potential for the journal to more explicitly engage in shaping vital disciplinary debates on decolonising geographical knowledges and to explore what this might mean for social and cultural geography. Third, we would like to see the journal play a leading role in charting the social and cultural implications of technological change, given the recent rise of digital geography as an important field of research. Finally, and consistent with the journal’s remit, we would like to encourage authors to develop even more strongly the social and cultural theoretical implications that arise from their empirical research. In short, we are looking forward to continuing to grow the journal as the leading sub-disciplinary journal for social and cultural geography; and to continue the journal’s strong commitment to theoretically consequential empirical research.

We have an exciting series of events planned in 2019 to celebrate the journal’s anniversary, to reflect on its contribution to critical scholarship in geography, and to consider the challenges and opportunities that are likely to emerge in the coming years. Our keynote event is a plenary lecture at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. by Professor Sharlene Mollett. Professor Mollett will speak on ‘Settler Colonial Futures: Residential Tourism and the promise of development in Panama’, followed by responses from a distinguished set of panellists: Professors Derek Alderman, Diana Ojeda, Joseph Bryan and Soren Larsen. We hope you can join us for what is sure to be a provocative and engaging discussion. Over the year, we will publish a series of virtual special issues that gather together key papers that have been published in Social & Cultural Geography over the past two decades. With support from our publishers, these virtual special issues will be free to access, and we hope they will stimulate discussion and inspire a new generation of social and cultural geographers. Finally, we will also publish a series of provocations throughout the year which we hope will inform future discussions and research in social and cultural geography. In doing so, we reaffirm our commitment to fostering scholarly debate about topical issues.

We offer our sincere thanks to our editors, editorial assistants, editorial board members and peer reviewers who have worked so hard over the past two decades to make Social & Cultural Geography the success that it is. Mary Gilmartin and Rob Wilton have recently stepped down as managing editor and editor respectively, and so we would like to take this opportunity to extend a special thanks to them for the outstanding work that they have contributed to the journal over recent years. We would also like to thank Michael Murphy for his invaluable work as editorial assistant.

Here’s to the next two decades of Social & Cultural Geography!