Areas of opportunity

Abstract

These are times of significant change. The climate is changing in unprecedented ways, and so are geographical relationships and ideas — and the responses of geographers to them. In this moment of change, we would like to introduce ourselves as the newly assembled editorial board and offer our collective sense of why Area continues to be an important outlet for geographical scholarship. We applaud how the journal has been stewarded by the previous editors, who managed through the peaks and on-going aftermaths of the Covid pandemic. We hope to continue advancing efforts to ensure that Area responds to, and helps make sense of, our changing times.

As editors, we continue to welcome submissions from across the breadth of geography as a discipline defined by diversity of thought, methods, approaches, and topics. In doing so, we rely on the expertise and insight of our expert peer-reviewers to support our decisions and inform the continued development and success of the journal. We encourage submissions from across the discipline and beyond our own research interests and specialisms which include environmental geography, resources, and sustainability; social and political geographies; political ecology; urban geography; physical landscape and environmental change; ethics; and contemporary social and spatial theory.

Area publishes empirical, conceptual, and methodological papers, and its relatively short word count pushes authors to present clear and concise arguments. An Area paper does not afford space for everything and instead asks authors to seek novel and innovative ways to position keystone or centrepiece concepts in larger bodies of work. This does not always require an extensive review of literature, or a broad overview of research context. Instead, Area offers an opportunity for a different kind of conversation, a different vehicle for intellectual exploration. This includes finding ways to develop interdisciplinary work that synthesises disparate literatures and concepts. Without constraining authors to predetermined formats, we highlight here that many of the papers in Area to which we are drawn derive their strength from how they advance their central arguments.

As incoming editors, we reviewed many compelling papers for the annual Area Prize, awarded to an outstanding contribution by an early-career researcher. Although there is no ‘ideal’ Area paper, the papers by Area prize winners showcase how concise, novel, and insightful arguments can make distinct interventions. We were delighted to award this year's prize to Palden Tsering's ‘Hybrid rangeland governance: connecting policies with practices in pastoral China’ (2024), a paper that pushes the reader to think beyond straightforward classifications of different kinds of property, instead asking how property and land governance work in practice, and how these practices challenge existing understandings. The work shows how hybridity, assemblage, and social power lie at the heart of controversies over rangeland use and space that entangle engineers, monks, and state authorities in China. We were also inspired by Lucy Thompson's ‘Dancing in the archive: bodily encounters, memory, and more-than-representational participatory historical geographies’ (2024), a paper that mobilised participatory historical geographies in nuanced and original ways to explore tap dance as an embodied geography not only of rhythm but of communities and identity. Together, these two brilliant studies – and those of past Area prize winners, too – help illustrate the range of approaches, topics, and methods that make for great Area papers.

These papers also signal several aspects that we hope future papers in Area will continue to emphasise. One is to help define the journal as a place for contributions that take risks, open new questions, and advance geographical insights. In this wider moment of change and uncertainty, we see value in questioning received categories and opening space for other ways of understanding familiar and unfamiliar places. This might mean using Area as an outlet for analysing understandings and ideas from new starting points. For example, much of the work across the Global South challenges orthodox categories of analysis, opening space for rethinking differently about what is, and what might be. There is also much changing in terms of human–environment research. While geographers have long studied how people relate to the environment, Area is increasingly publishing papers that explicitly attend to changing politics, practices, and understandings of sustainability amid global political, economic, and environmental change.

Another aspect of geographical scholarship we wish to amplify is work that bridges physical and human geography. Interest and investment in interdisciplinary research are rapidly rising, propelled by a proliferation of funding schemes, thematic calls, and university incentives. Geography has been in a longstanding discussion regarding what interdisciplinarity means for the discipline. We see Area as an outlet for continuing that work. For example, the recently published special section on ‘rivers as borders’ (Kanesu et al., 2025), which examines how social and cultural phenomena are informed, shaped, and steered by physical landscapes, illustrates well the kinds of overlapping areas of scholarship and intersectionality that we are eager to see.

Finally, Area has developed a critical space within geography for reflections on geographical methods and the ethical complexities of contemporary scholarship. Through both open submissions and special sections, Area has been an important space for methodological innovation and experimentation, giving freedom to examine how forms of creativity can be embraced across the discipline, while also asking critical questions about the limits of such methods and their ethical implications. This might increasingly extend to considerations of the shifting understandings of what ‘research’ means and how it is valued by society, as well as ethical questions about who defines positive research impacts and who benefits from academic research. In a context of rapidly advancing new technologies, and an academy that is increasingly unstable and insecure across much of the world, space to examine the ethical challenges of the present is as vital as ever. As editors, we want Area to retain, and defend, its place as a site for critical discussions of how the ethics and methods of geography are responding to a changing world.

As we commit ourselves to stewarding Area during our respective tenures, we also commit as editors to an openness to new and unorthodox ideas, to supporting risk-taking appropriate to the scale of contemporary challenges, and to encouraging submissions that combine adventurous scholarship with that searching form of inquiry that seeks to make lasting contributions.