One year from its launch at AC2014, we want to highlight an opportunity to publish reviews in Geo: Geography and Environment. Geo welcomes high quality review papers which provide theoretical, methodological and topical analysis for advanced researchers in the field, or offer critical perspectives that engage cross-disciplinary collaborations, explore policy implications and address issues of global concern (see guidelines for authors). We are especially interested in reviews exploring what it means to assemble communities of knowledge differently and making use of the opportunities for online, open access publication.
We produce reviews in our PhDs, our grant proposals and our publications. To review is to assess and appraise. Reviews have a temporal element: looking back to assess and forward to propose change. A review is also a spatial practice: the review synthesises by defining and appraising a field. Yet, margins can be reinscribed and peripheries created in this process of producing knowledge. Situated epistemological differences may get recast as conceptual or methodological ‘problems’ to be solved by further integration with the theoretical core. There can be good reasons for an emphasis on consensus or periods of normal science. However, postcolonial, feminist and geopolitical critiques attune us to the active processes through which knowledge practices are made marginal and the implications of overly dominant scientific cultures. New practices of review have the potential to make these geographies of knowledge production more visible and so create the conditions for a different circulation and assemblage of ideas.
Innovations across the social and natural sciences, arts and humanities are advancing alternative resources for constructing and disseminating reviews. From the sciences: systematic reviews demonstrate how criteria for inclusion and exclusion can be made more explicit and accountable; large-scale data sets offer opportunities for developing and tracking the back-and-forth of new modes of co-operation; network analysis software can map evolving patterns of inter-citations and the relational transformation of their content. These have not featured widely in geographical reviews, but used reflexively, they have potential across the social and natural sciences. From the digital arts and humanities there are promising experiments in developing online platforms to support collaborative working and review; innovative visualisations of data, concepts and relations; and alternative forms and frames for data mining that value difference in previously unseen data.
Geo: Geography and Environment has space for review and we want to encourage reflection on these spaces of review. We welcome your conversations and all submissions, especially those mapping the ways in which communities of knowledge emerge and creating innovative, interdisciplinary and inclusionary spaces through review.
Gail Davies and Anson Mackay (Co-Editors in Chief)
Geo: Geography and Environment 