Nurturing a new generation of geographers

The first week of July was a busy time for those attending the Institute of Australian Geographers’ conference in Adelaide, South Australia. Like all such meetings of our community I have attended, it was characterised by collegial warmth, interesting presentations, and opportunities to mingle during breaks, social events, and field trips. Huge thanks to the organisers and Council for your efforts.

Later in the week, Iain Hay powerfully appealed to us all to understand the parlous state of the discipline in Australia and to be strong public advocates for what we do, including across all three tiers of government and the private and non-government sectors. His views will feature in our Wiley Lecture paper in due course.

I mention that important presentation because, early in the week, I was delighted to spend part of an afternoon with around 40 higher degree research candidates in a conversation focused on writing and publishing strategies. If their penetrating questions and engaging discussions are anything to go by, I have hope for geography—notwithstanding the perennial and urgent need to ensure the discipline is visible, legible, and relevant to those who shape policy across all sectors.

With their blessing, I want to share the questions higher degree research candidates had prepared in advance and which I was provided in the lunch break to reflect on prior to our session. Their queries reveal both concerns our early career peers have and their views on  the state of the discipline and higher education and on writing and publishing (see also Stratford, 2024; Stratford et al., 2024). The questions illuminate a collective astuteness that bodes well, especially IF more of us energetically campaign for geography in the public domain to optimise the chance, first, that the discipline is recognised and funded under its own name and, second, that new job opportunities are created from those efforts. What I won’t do here is provide the answers I worked through with the candidates. Doing so would turn this work into a longer paper rather than an editorial and perhaps in the new year I can return to such a task. In the interim, readers might be interested in viewing one of our webinars from February this year on a related topic. You can find the recording on the journal homepage under Browse > Webinars.

Last but not least, I am delighted to welcome to the core editorial team two new Associate Editors, Brian Cook and Miriam Williams. My thanks to them for their engagement and service. And thanks, too, to Mark Wang, who is stepping down from the Board. I also want to welcome Sarah Rogers and Catherine Walker, who are joining the Board from mid-year. We are always deeply grateful to Board members, reviewers, authors, and our readers for ongoing support for the journal, discipline, and Institute and I know our colleagues at Wiley feel the same. [Correction added on 9 July 2024, after first online publication: Last paragraph in section 1 has been added]

This issue leads with Associate Editor Clare Mouat’s observations on the labours of decolonisation and regeneration by grassroot and geography communities, and builds on last year’s commentary by her in its focus on the revolutionary possibilities of love as wayfinding (Mouat, 2023). On this occasion, Mouat (2024) shares her views on Matariki (aka Pleiades), which marks a ‘Māori new year holiday, unifying national identity, and sky-sharing across intersecting knowledge systems’.

We then feature another in our running series of special commentaries on COVID-19, in which Somaiah et al. (2024) consider challenges faced by migrant domestic workers and transnational foodcare chains in pandemic times. Their focus is on Southeast Asia and the vital foodwork women engaged in during the emergency, and the conclusion is telling: ‘foodcare chains have proven to be resilient so far, pressures on long-term remittance-driven maternal migration into precarious work are likely to intensify with prolonged crisis’.

The balance of the issue comprises eight original papers. The first four all concern matters broadly pertaining to urban environments but from diverse places around the globe and drawing on divergent perspectives to provide a range of novel insights. Hsu et al. (2024) share new research on co-working office spaces in Sydney and critically examine a range of spatiotemporal dynamics and industry patterns evident in their analysis. They establish that there is a growing trend across industry types to provide co-working office space for spatial flexibility, and show how co-working spaces are increasingly concentrated in urban office landscapes within the CBD and emerging throughout the city. In work by Boswell et al. (2024), the politics of do-it-yourself urbanism are considered in terms of experimentation, privilege, and difference. Their focus is the post-quake DIY urban venue, Pallet Pavilion, in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Their analysis of its effects shows both the potential for gentrification and a radical city politics based around creating spaces for difference. Then, Legacy et al. (2024) provide a forensic exploration of transport planning history in Victoria, Australia, and propose an alternative transport planning practice grounded in an ethics of care that has salience well beyond the case. Kanosvamhira and Tevera (2024) then unveil their work on quiet activism in urban community gardens, showing how those sites are powerful and liberatory agents for food sovereignty both in general and in South Africa, where their work is based.

Flowing logically—at least in my eyes—from that paper is another focused on rural and regional communities, work by Wu et al. (2024) on how Timorese seasonal workers in Australia experience isolation and opportunity and craft third spaces, with at least some such experiences being inflected with colonialist undertones. As I curated the issue, that observation on my part led me to position next a paper by Chen and Howitt (2024) entitled Taiwan inside-out: rescaling colonial constructions of Taiwan through a Tayal-focused lens. Where many works on this fascinating archipelago consider it in relation to mainland China, this one engages in ‘refocusing a scaled geopolitical lens on Indigenous Tayal people of northern Taiwan … [to offer] new perspectives on the social construction of scale and wider geopolitics’ and turns ‘thinking about Taiwan inside-out’.

The seventh and eighth papers in the issue deal with particular cohorts and their geographies. In one, Taylor et al. (2024) outline work on the Healthy Ageing/Vulnerable Environment (HAVEN) Index. Combining data about social, economic, and built and physical environments, it helps identify areas associated with higher risk of mortality and emergency morbidities among older people—in this instance, in Adelaide, South Australia. And last, Mansvelt (2024) has written a richly storied account of hosting and the normative presence of Christmas in older people’s lives. That work touches on how the Christmas season reflects and creates powerful social norms that shape a range of socialities, subjectivities, and spatialities, which Mansvelt considers in detail to reveal their wider relevance in broadly Christian cultures.

Last but not least, we have two book reviews for your information. The first by Burton (2024) centres on Greg Sharzer’s (2022) Late escapism and contemporary neoliberalism: alienation, work and utopia; the second by Feng Kong (2024) on Amrita Daniere and Matthias Garschagen’s (2019) book, Urban climate resilience in Southeast Asia. Enjoy—and do remember, if you have recently published a book or read something and would like to provide a review, please let us know.