you are here: the journal of creative geography
Call for submissions 2027!
Hello from the you are here editorial team: Ryan Fatica (Seal) and Diana Khaziakhmetova!
We are excited to announce the theme of our 2027 issue: Terrains of Contestation and Respair.
As we prepare this call for submissions, contestations over the use of space are visible all around the world, including right here in the borderlands. Just 85 miles south of Tucson, protesters have established a land defense camp and a treesit high in the branches of an ancient cottonwood tree along the so-called US/Mexico border. By placing their bodies between the trees and construction equipment, they’ve halted the construction of a new, 30-foot-tall steel bollard wall along a fifteen-mile stretch for the last two months. In the conflict currently unfolding in the San Rafael Valley near Lochiel, Arizona, we see a microcosm of thousands of years of history of spatial contestation.
But it’s not just here, it’s everywhere. Space plays a crucial role across today’s political, economic, social, and cultural struggles. Land, borders, homes, cities, art sculptures in urban parks, and prisons in remote rural areas are produced through power and constantly contested. Reading news, chatting with colleagues and friends, and walking in our hometowns we see how spatial structures are imposed from the top and disrupted through resistance, solidarity, and care from the bottom.
Since the foundational 19th century anarchist geographers Peter Kropotkin (1972) and Elisee Reclus (2013) established geography as a discipline for analyzing oppressive concentrations of power, since Guy Debord’s first dérives through the streets of Haussmann’s Paris (Debord, 1955), since Henri Lefebvre first used space as a framework for understanding the cataclysm of rock, graffiti, and broken glass that transformed those same streets in May 1968 (1991), geography has long been a tool for understanding space and the ways we contest it.
Indigenous scholarship further challenges colonial assumptions about space and place: place, being central to Indigenous way of life, is the main way to approach colonialism, Indigenous resistance, and resurgence. Indeed, as Keith Basso tells us, “Wisdom Sits in Places” (1996), as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson tells us, land is pedagogy (2014), and as Michelle Daigle (2024) highlights “the deep rootedness of Indigenous governance and sovereignty that arise from Indigenous belongings and accountabilities to specific places.” From Land Back movements to the resurgence of Indigenous place names, the work on contesting colonial geographies and creating sustaining our own spatial orders continues.
Besides contestation, in this issue we also want to make room for hope. Inspired by Black feminist thought, we turn to respair. As Jennifer Nash (2024) puts it, it is a return of hope after a period of despair. We see it as a work of remaining, relating, and creating within conditions designed to displace or exhaust us: as Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart highlights “Staying is complicated. Not staying, however, is unthinkable” (2025).
We invite submissions that ask and explore answers to:
- How is space used to enforce power, dispossession, and erasure?
- How do people contest dominant spatial arrangements and imaginaries?
- What relationships, practices, and creative forms make other worlds possible?
- Where does respair emerge, and what kinds of spaces can it help us build?
We welcome academic and experimental formats, essays, poetry, cartographies, visual and digital art, sound art, and any other media that you can imagine, create, and submit that speaks to the theme.
Submission Deadline: October 31, 2026
Submit via Google Form here.
Submission Guidelines here.
Questions? Reach out to us at: youarehere.arizona@gmail.com
Let’s create a space for respair in a world full of despair.
– Diana and Ryan
Citations
Basso, K. H. (1996). Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the Western Apache. University of New Mexico Press.
Daigle, M. (2025). Indigenous peoples’ geographies I: Indigenous spatialities beyond place through relational, mobile and hemispheric & global approaches. Progress in Human Geography, 49(2), 182–193. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325241283843
Debord, G. (1955, September). Introduction to a critique of urban geography (K. Knabb, Trans.). Les Lèvres Nues. Retrieved from The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/guy-debord-introduction-to-a-critique-of-urban-geography
Hobart, H. J. K. (2025). Indigenous placemaking amidst settler colonial leisure: A tale of Hawaiʻi’s living parks. Political Geography, 121, 103226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103226
Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A factor in evolution. Penguin Books. 1972.
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell.
Nash, J. C. (2024). How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478059509
Reclus, E. (2013). Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Elisee Reclus. Clark, J. (editor) and Martin, C. (editor). Oakland: PM Press.
Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25.