Editorial: looking forward

Abstract

This is my third editorial (Ward 2010 2011), and it will be my shortest. Over the last twelve months this journal has continued to do what it does best – publish ‘ground breaking geographical research and scholarship across the field of geography.’ And why wouldn't it? We have built on the changes we outlined this time last year (Ward 2011), most noticeably the revamped Reviews format, which now does more than simply ‘review’‘books’. A small number of other changes have also been made during 2011, in order to improve our ‘offer’, if you like, to potential authors and to readers of Area. First, to support the two Editors the journal's Editorial Board has been expanded to include Sara Kindon from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Sara has written about participatory action research and the use of participatory video in geographic research, as well as about youth geographies, feminist fieldwork and gender and development, and is a great addition to Area's Editorial Board. She joins me, Paul Wood (Loughborough University), Jurgen Essletzbichler (University College London) and Mark Whitehead (Aberystwyth University). Sara may not be the last new Board member either, as we continue to strive to achieve a sustainable balance between the day-to-day editorial work and the more strategic objectives of the journal. Of course, we do not have a monopoly on good ideas. So, we are open to suggestions you may have about changes you would like to see in Area. We can't guarantee we'll take them all on board but we will listen. Second, over the course of 2011 Area began inviting its authors to write pieces for Geography Directions (http://www.geographydirections.com). These short blog entries are based on the longer papers published in the journal and provide another way of reaching out to others with our work. They are free to access, and the journal's first author-led entry was written by Anna Davies and Ruth Doyle (Trinity College Dublin) and was entitled ‘Sustainable futures and household water usage.’ Several more have been written subsequently, including by Cian O'Callaghan (National University of Ireland) entitled ‘Urban plans lost but not forgotten in a time of financial crisis’, by Dave Bassens (Ghent University) entitled ‘Goldman Sachs rules the world, Islam style?’ and by Ilan Kelman (Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo) entitled ‘Floods should not mean disasters.’ Others are in the pipeline and are something to bear in mind when you submit your papers to the journal, as we hope you all will! This will not be the end of the journal's use of a range of technologies, as we strive to enhance the impact of the work published in Area. Third, this issue sees the first ‘Classics Revisited’ section in the journal. This will return to important papers published in Area and consists of a commentary from the original author(s), as well as a couple of shorter pieces by others on the original paper's legacy. The first in the series sees Jamie Peck (University of British Columbia) and Adam Tickell (University of Birmingham) revisit their 1994 Area paper, ‘Jungle law breaks out: neoliberalism and global-local disorder’. Not only is it one of the most cited papers in the journal's history, but it marks a very early attempt by geographers to grapple with something called ‘neoliberalism’. Did any of us really know then quite how much geographers would write on this subject? I doubt it. Julie MacLeavy (University of Bristol) and David Wilson (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) provide their thoughts on both the original and the follow-up by Peck and Tickell. From now on every year will see a Classics Revisited section. Finally, I am delighted to announce that Karin Schwiter at the University of Zurich has won the 2011 Area Prize for her paper ‘Anticipating the transition to parenthood: the contribution of Foucaultian discourse analysis to understanding life-course patterns’. Karin's contribution is a theoretically sophisticated, methodologically rigorous and empirically rich piece of work, one that epitomises the kind of research the journal wishes to publish. Honourable mentions also go to Lee Johnson (Simon Fraser University) for ‘Greening the campus without grass: using visual methods to understand and integrate student perspectives in campus landscape development and water sustainability planning’ (co-authored with Heather Castleden) and Kimberley Peters (University of Sheffield) for ‘Sinking the radio ‘pirates’: exploring British strategies of governance in the North Sea, 1964–1991’. Of course, these papers, like all the others we publish every year, had to have been reviewed by a number of you. So, thank you to the 160 plus reviewers used by Area during 2011. You know who you are, and so does everyone else, thanks to our list in the last issue!