This art icle was downloaded by: [ York Universit y Libraries] On: 09 April 2015, At : 12: 37 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions f or aut hors and subscript ion inf ormat ion: ht t p: / / www. t andf online. com/ loi/ cgpc20 Moving on up Linda Peake a a Previous Managing Edit or (moving on up…) Published online: 12 Feb 2008. To cite this article: Linda Peake (2008) Moving on up, Gender, Place & Cult ure: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 15: 1, 7-10, DOI: 10. 1080/ 09663690701817451 To link to this article: ht t p: / / dx. doi. org/ 10. 1080/ 09663690701817451 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem ands, cost s, expenses, dam ages, and ot her liabilit ies what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h, in relat ion t o or arising out of t he use of t he Cont ent . This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm s- and- condit ions Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 15, No. 1, February 2008, 7–10 EDITORIAL Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:37 09 April 2015 Moving on up Any journal, but especially a feminist journal, needs a change of personnel in order to breathe new life into it. It has now been six years since I joined the Editorial Team of this journal and it has been a wonderfully engaging period, one that I have enjoyed tremendously, but it is time to move on while the journal is moving on up! Since its inauguration in 1994 the journal has gone from strength to strength. The increasing number of submissions meant that in 1999 we went from two issues a year to four, and in 2006 we initiated another increase in issues from four to six a year. Indeed, the number of submissions to the journal has doubled over the last five years. This is not the only change that has been made to the journal; to cope with the influx of articles it has also been necessary to institute structural changes. In order to be able to sustain the rigorous reviewing procedure adopted by the journal – double blind reviewing with three reviews for each submission – it was necessary to move on from a structure of two editors to having an Editorial Team of four editors, one of whom takes responsibility for being the Managing Editor, in addition to two Book Review Editors. As of January 2008 Brenda Yeoh (National University of Singapore) will take over the post of Managing Editor and Beverley Mullings (Queen’s University, Canada) will join the Editorial Team, currently comprising Deborah Dixon (University of WalesAberystwyth) and Robyn Longhurst (University of Waikato, New Zealand). Rachel Silvey (University of Toronto, Canada) will continue as Book Review Editor, while Claire Dwyer (UC London, England) will be replaced by Patricia Noxolo (Loughborough, England). This move to a team approach also speaks to a desire to move on from the conventional and somewhat hierarchical editorial structure of GPC to a more collective one that is inclusive of diverse geographical locations and racialised identities. In terms of feminist practice, however, I think it is the sending out of copies of all three reviewers’ reports and the editor’s letter to each reviewer as well as to the author that has given the journal its greatest level of feedback from both authors and reviewers. This practice of communication between editors, authors and referees, what Liz Bondi (2004, 85) refers to as ‘unpublicized and apparently routine practices’ speaks to the journal’s commitment to a feminist practice of knowledge production. Reviewers also, almost without exception, provide generous and often exceptionally detailed reviews that help an author to rethink their paper and improve upon it to a very high degree, enabling the journal to publish the work of a large number of young scholars or those whose first language is not English, as well as papers from well established scholars with international reputations. I hope this practice also shows the high regard in which we hold our referees. Without their work the collegial nature of journal publishing would collapse; indeed the journal would collapse. ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09663690701817451 http://www.informaworld.com Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:37 09 April 2015 8 L. Peake Changes have also been made to the Editorial Board, past and current members of which have been a vital part of the journal’s mandate to increase its profile and standing in the discipline. Members now rotate on a three year basis ensuring that new members have the opportunity to be a part of the journal. In efforts to ensure the journal reflects the increasing range of feminist geographers’ interests, members of the editorial board are chosen to represent different fields within feminist geography as well as global locations that are also representative of the racial diversity among geographers. In addition to these changes we have also attempted to raise the profile of the journal in the academic geography community. In 2006 we initiated The Gender, Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Lecture, given by Ruth Fincher at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting (see this issue for the second in the series given by Cindi Katz at the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers (RGS/IBG) annual meeting). The Editorial Team had been thinking for a while of having an annual lecture for the journal when we were approached by John Paul Jones III and Sallie Marston from the Geography Department at the University of Arizona who had engaged in a serious fundraising exercise to honour Jan Monk’s many contributions to the discipline. They successfully secured funding to invite a well-known feminist geography scholar to visit the department for a week and to give a public lecture. In order to secure a broader audience that could benefit from these activities they suggested that the recipient also give a lecture at an annual meeting of geographers which could then be published in the journal. Given that Jan has been a long-time associate of the journal we were delighted to be able to support this move. The generous financial help of our publishers, Taylor and Francis, allowed this to become a reality. In 2007, we also put into place The Gender, Place and Culture Award for New and Emerging Scholars. This award – for US $1000 – is intended to be used for attendance at an international conference, at which the awardee will present a paper on a topic relating to feminist geography (see the advertisement in this issue). Priority for this award is given to current graduate students or faculty members within three years of receiving their PhD, who work in departments where little or no money is available for conference participation, and who have no recourse to grants from major funding agencies. This award was given for the first time this year to Alena Rochovská from Slovakia. Alena completed her PhD thesis in 2005 (at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia) on the topic of the feminisation of poverty in Slovakia in the post-socialist period. She currently works as a lecturer of Social Geography in the Department of Human Geography and Demography at Comenius University (see her report in this issue). There are other milestones I want to celebrate. In a previous editorial Gill Valentine and myself (2003) remarked on the need to diversify the journal in terms of encouraging women of colour to publish in it. This is starting to happen. In volume 13.1 we had the first ever set of theme papers published by women of colour in a geography journal, which focused on race and racism within the academy. Feedback reveals that the issue has been quite pivotal for geographers who were committed to social change yet at the same time did not fully understand the experiences of women of colour in our discipline. It also opened up a new space for up and coming graduate students of colour who were encouraged to study geography at the graduate level (personal communication, Minelle Mahtani 2007). Much more though remains to be done. As Liz Bondi (2004, 81) has noted, the journal is always operating both ‘“within and against” the academy . . . at its best Gender, Place and Culture can be understood as an embodiment of “paradoxical spaces” in which feminist geography is practiced creatively and productively. But . . . the journal’s capacity to operate is this way is always fleeting, Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:37 09 April 2015 Gender, Place and Culture 9 uncertain and contestable’. I agree: we need always to be vigilant to our own complicities and take action against them. In this vein, one other attempt we have made to address structures and practices of unevenness and inequality in the discipline is to tackle the issue of Anglo-American hegemony in terms of the dominance of the English language. In 2004 we started to publish all journal abstracts in Spanish as well as in English. This is a small step, but a necessary and first one, and one that other journals are also undertaking (such as ACME, an e-journal, and the Journal of Social and Cultural Geography, which publish complete articles in translation). In volume 13.1 we also published an editorial by Maria Dolores Garcia Ramon, Kirsten Simonsen and Dina Vaiou in which they investigated the extent to which Gender, Place and Culture was implicit in reproducing this hegemony. Indeed, Claire Dwyer’s editorial in this issue on the process of book reviewing was composed as a response to some of the issues they raise. We will continue to follow up on other issues. Another sign of the increasing maturity of the journal has been its acceptance for inclusion in the ISI Citation Index (as of June 2008). As I write this there has been an ominous tone to many emails circulating on geography listservs about the iniquity of citation indices and the rapacious nature of the publishing industry (see also The ACME Editorial Collective 2007).1 The Editorial Team at Gender, Place and Culture also has a necessarily healthy scepticism around citation indices, but we feel that concerns with such measures of academic ‘success’ have also to take into account the ways in which scholars in the global south are affected by them; this is not only an issue for Anglo-American hegemony and the British Research Assessment Exercise. We have been told, for example, by feminist colleagues in South Korea that they simply cannot publish in journals that do not have ISI inclusion. It is, then, in the interests of increasing participation in the journal from feminists who have so far been excluded that we support the journal being included in the ISI Citation Index. One area in which the journal has been less than successful is in attracting articles displaying a wide range of methodologies. Well over 95% of articles submitted rely on qualitative methods (with the theme papers on feminist applications of GIS in volume 9.3 being a notable exception). While many feminists have eschewed the positivist epistemology underlying traditional approaches to quantitative techniques few have found ways of incorporating such techniques into postcolonial feminist research. While there have been works in the past decade in Women’s Studies (Oakley 1998) and in Geography (Lawson 1995) emphasising the ‘red herring’ nature of the quantitative versus qualitative divide, they have obviously had very little impact on the ways in which feminist geographers approach research based questions of knowledge production. I believe we are in danger of producing a whole generation of feminist geographers – and not just feminist geographers – who not only have no interest in quantitative techniques, but also have no training in how and when (or not) to use them, cutting off from enquiry and analysis a wide swathe of policy-based and applied research. I would go so far as to suggest, in terms of my editorship, that issues of methodology are the most serious the journal has to address. There have also been technical changes that I should tell you about to the way in which the journal moves articles through the production process. In 2008 the journal may change to Manuscript Central, a web portal that allows for electronic submission and tracking of articles, as well as adopting a new production initiative called CATS (‘Central Article Tracking System’). CATS is a web-based production database that monitors and tracks the progress of each article through the entire production cycle (from publisher’s receipt of the article from the editor, to copy-edit, typeset, proof stage, correction, and print and online publication). Other changes we are considering are the instructions we give to reviewers, instructions, for example, that we feel privilege authors who have online and immediate access to relevant Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 12:37 09 April 2015 10 L. Peake bodies of literature.2 In addressing changes such as these we hope to start to address the imbalances between authors and reviewers who have access to abundance and those that do not. Finally, given that this is my last chance to thank folks with whom I have worked over the last six years, I would like to state what a pleasure it has been to work with the various Publishing Editors and Production Editors at Taylor and Francis, all of whom have given the journal wonderful support, namely Jonathan Manley, Rod Cookson, Louise Glenn, Josephine Oakley, and Stuart Woodman. Special thanks must go to Jessica Vivian, whose long term association with, and support of, the journal has always been there and has always been invaluable. The Editorial Team has also been extremely fortunate to have been able to work with some incredibly dedicated graduate students who have taken on the role of editorial assistants. In particular I want to thank Liz Millward, Katherine McKittrick, and currently Leeann Townsend, who has gone beyond the bounds of duty in her dedication to the journal. I know the other Editorial Team members feel the same about their own Editorial Assistants (Theodora Lam in Singapore, Laura Jones in Wales, and Cherie Todd in New Zealand). I will greatly miss my working relationships with the Editorial Team members, and our Editorial Assistants, and the Editorial Board members, but I do look forward to continuing my involvement with the journal and with the journal increasing its influence within the many communities of feminist geographers. Linda Peake Previous Managing Editor (moving on up . . . ) Notes 1. 2. We also wish to make it clear that there has never been any pressure from Taylor and Francis to apply for inclusion or to search out articles and authors that would be highly cited. See also Emel et al. (2004) for similar concerns they are addressing in Geoforum. References ACME Editorial Collective. 2007. The politics of indexing and ranking academic journals. ACME 6, no. 2: 131– 4. Bondi, Liz. 2002. Gender, Place and Culture: Paradoxical spaces? In Feminist geography in practice: Research and methods. ed. Pam Moss. London: Blackwell. Emel, Jody, Andrew Leyshon, and Jenny Robinson. 2004. A five year plan? Providing a forum for excellence and diversity in geography. Geoforum 35, no. 1: 1–4. Garcia, Ramon, Maria Dolors, Kirsten Simonsen, and Dina Vaiou. 2006. Does Anglophone hegemony permeate GPC? Gender, Place and Culture 13, no. 1: 1–5. Lawson, Vicki. 1995. The politics of difference: Examining the quantitative/qualitative dualism in poststructuralist feminist research. The Professional Geographer 47, no. 4: 449–57. Oakley, A. 1998. Gender, methodology and people’s ways of knowing: Some problems with feminism and the paradigm debate in social science. Sociology 32, no. 4: 707–31. Peake, Linda, and Gill Valentine. 2003. Editorial. Gender, Place and Culture 10, no. 2: 107–9.