you are here: the journal of creative geography
2025 call for submissions is coming soon!
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Native artists do “not merely address the world of aesthetics; [they] also seek[] to produce identities based on the various notions of Native community, notions that for some can range great distances, both spatial and temporal.” – Mario A. Caro, The Native as Image: Art History, Nationalism, and Decolonizing Aesthetics
“Multiplicity is inherent in kinship; good relations require acknowledgement and, importantly, mindful accommodation of difference…. Kinship isn’t just a thing, it’s an active network of connections, a process of continual acknowledgement and enactment. To be human is to practice humanness… Kinship makes people of us through responsibilities to one another.” — Daniel Heath Justice (citizen of the Cherokee Nation), Why Indigenous Literatures Matter
“Decolonization is not an individual choice. We must collectively oppose a system of compulsory settler sexuality and family [by] caretaking precious kin that came to us in diverse ways—is an important step to unsettling settler sex and family.” —Dr. Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), “Chapter 3: Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family” in Making Kin Not Population
“Identity for Indigenous peoples is grounded in their relationships with the land, with their ancestors who have returned to the land and with future generations who will come into being on the land. Rather than viewing ourselves as being in relationship with other people or things, we are the relationships that we hold and are part of.” —Shawn Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree), Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods
“This to me points to the relational nature of our knowledge—the journey changes with a companion, the methodology is relational…. Relationality gives birth to meaning.” —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance.
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The theme of the 2024 issue of you is here: the journal of creative geography is mapping all my relations. The phrase “all my relations” is nearly ubiquitous to Indigenous communities of the Americas, an expression that demonstrates a worldview of relationality and kinship across species, space, and time. In this way, relationality refers to the interconnectedness of all things and kinship works to define how those connections are co-constituted through an emphasis of care, respect, and obligation. Mapping one’s relations means to acknowledge the harmonious network of beings connected within you, from you, and through you. We are multiple and in each of us are many— more than the cozy microbes that build particles and fleshy boundaries, we are made up of those who came before us and those who will come after.
In establishing and maintaining kinship relations, we understand our kin to engage a reciprocal recognition of our sovereign selves. Kinship is not limited to blood-relations, although this can be a part of it. It expands outward as well as inward to include extra-familial (beyond blood-ties and settler colonial heteropatriarchal understandings of bounded nuclear families), interspecies (meaning ties with more-than-human such as plant, animal, fungi, land, water, rock, thunder, and spirit being kin), and intergenerational (both ancestral and future-looking) connections.
As Native/Native-descendant editors committed to collaboration and mutual flourishing, we invite and encourage submissions to this year's theme that call upon, question, and reconnect with relations across a multitude of mediums and multimodal expressions. We are invested in scholarships with world-making capacities, work that honors existing relationships and make space for new and emergent forms of kinship. We believe strongly in the capabilities of creative work, ethical and reciprocal representation, and embodied performance to nurture existent relations and invite new connections.
As contributors to this year’s issue, mapping all my relations, we invite you to consider the following questions: What geographies have been denied the worldview of kinship and what interventions, disruptions, and/or imaginaries are working to reclaim these spaces? How can relationality be geographical? What are the bodily and identity-based cartographies that challenge colonial bordering and boundings and how can these kinships be represented and visualized? How can we recuperate authentic and reciprocal interspecies kinship relationships in a time of widespread disconnection reinforced by necropolitics? What is your relational landscape/scape? Who are “(all your) relations”?
For the 2024 issue of you are here: the journal of creative geography, we invite you to submit:
- Counter-hegemonic forms of geographical kinship representation, including work in Indigenous cartography, critical GIS, counter-mapping, anti-mapping, critical remote sensing, critical cartography, post- and de-colonial mapping, feminist visualization, story mapping, and creative cartography.
- Art and creative writing that challenges and/or reimagines dominant spatial imaginaries, including those of the body, the city, the landscape, the nation-state, the transnational, the global, the mind and memory, and other geographic locations and formations that impact relationship building.
- Multimodal responses that engage a mapping of reciprocity, re(they)(ma)titration, and explorations of kinship cartographies across and beyond species.
- Creative work of all genres that uses geographic concepts, representations, and tools to imagine and bring into being other worlds and otherwise ways of relating and produces new and critical ways of visualizing, representing, and performing space, place, and the geographic imagination as it relates to kinship networks understood broadly.
We are particularly interested in creative work that draws on critical knowledge traditions within and beyond geography, including:
- Black geographies and ecologies, Black studies, Afro-futurisms and Indigenous-futurisms (as entangled), Black sci-fi and speculative traditions
- Indigenous geographies and cartographies, Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, Indigenous creative and spatial traditions
- Latinx geographies and Latinx cultural production
- Perspectives issuing from the Global South, diasporic locations, and the postcolonial world
- Geographies of disability and critical disability studies
- Queer and trans geographies, queer and trans studies, queer and trans cultural production
- Intersectional feminisms, feminist visualization, feminist methodology, feminist sci-fi and speculative traditions
We accept submissions in the form of: creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, performance, film, maps, multimedia, visual art, digital art, sound art, and any other genre you can imagine, create, and submit. Submissions can be authored by individuals, collaborations, or collectives. Please see our submission guidelines for details and be sure to submit a cover sheet with your submission (provided on our submissions guidelines page). Please note, if you have submitted work to our journal before, we have updated our submission process to a singular, in-depth submission form.
If you have any lingering questions about a potential submission or format, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at youarehere.arizona@gmail.com or direct message us on social media. If you would like to submit in a language other than English or Spanish, please reach out so that we can ensure reviewers fluent in that language are available