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you are here: the journal of creative geography

About the Journal

you are here: the journal of creative geography is published by graduate students in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. The journal, founded in 1998, is an annual publication that seeks to explore geographic themes through articles, fiction, poetry, essays, maps, photography, and other art forms.

As we approach the journal’s twenty-fourth issue, we want to take a brief moment to welcome back returning readers and to introduce ourselves to our growing audience. What are creative geographies?

For us, creative geographies are critical engagements of/with landscape, space, place, environment, and other geographic themes by way of artistic expression and practice. The scope and methodological directions of creative geographies are broad, experimental, and ever expanding. In this way, you are here sees creative geographies as an amorphous and transdisciplinary space. As editors, we are particularly interested in how creative practices and geographic imaginations intersect with critical knowledge traditions and locations on the “margins” of dominant geographic thought, knowledge, representation, and practice. These intersectional and in-between sites are rich with insight, discovery, transformation, critical perspectives, and new ways of thinking and knowing. Our journal aims to provide a platform for these conversations and subsequently expand the boundaries of geography from the view of its margins.

The editors of the 2023 issue, counter/cartographies, are Eden Kinkaid and Cassidy Schoenfelder.

 

Find us on the web and browse previous issues at youareheregeography.com. To follow our activities and other creative geographical content, follow us on Twitter (@youarehereUA) and Instagram (@youarehereUA).

call for submissions
you are here: the journal of creative geography
2023 issue: counter/cartographies
closes January 15, 2023

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“Any dominant form of space or spatiality stands as, and is, power, as it structures particular values about, views of, and practices within the world and reinforces these structures by shaping encounters to match that world.” ⁠⁠⁠— Natchee Blu Barnd, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism

“Counter-mapping practices build directly on the critiques of official cartography: its role in establishing and maintaining the nation-state, colonial conquest, and capitalist social relations. These critiques also show that the map is never, despite all its proclamations, representative, rather, the map itself is productive.” — Liz Mason-Deese, “Counter-mapping,” in The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography

“...the liveability of the world is bound up with a human geography story that is not presently just, yet geography discloses a workable terrain through which respatialization can be and is imagined and achieved.” —Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle

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The theme of the 2023 issue of you are here: the journal of creative geography is counter/cartographies -- a term we use to gesture toward a diversity of critical geographic projects intent on disrupting dominant representations, knowledge, imaginaries, and practices of space and place. These are geographic projects that remember, imagine, embody, and enact other worlds: possible worlds, forgotten worlds, worlds already existing but under erasure by hegemonic geographies. In working to counter/cartographies, we reckon with the central role that maps -- and their accompanying spatial imaginaries, narratives, and practices -- have played in producing geographies of injustice: the Third World, colonies, ghettos, plantations, reservations, partitions, borders, and the other countless sacrifice zones of racial capitalism.

Recognizing the power of geographic knowledge to shape the world in its image (for better or for worse), we invite radical reimaginings of space, place, and landscape that demonstrate the possibility, necessity, and contours of other worlds -- worlds yet to come into being or worlds already here but at the margins of dominant geographic representations and itineraries.

In the spirit of counter/cartographies, we invite you to explore the following questions: What geographies -- material, embodied, imagined, remembered, cultural, political, virtual, etc. -- require a critical remapping? What geographies might be brought into being through the convergence and jostling of different geographic imaginations, epistemologies, and ontologies? What do these confluences have to do with struggles for more just and vibrant political, cultural, and ecological futures? What futures are made possible through a collective reimagining of space and place?

For the 2023 issue of you are here: the journal of creative geography, we invite you to submit:

  • Counter-hegemonic forms of geographical representation, including work in Indigenous cartography, critical GIS, counter-mapping, anti-mapping, critical remote sensing, critical cartography, post- and de-colonial mapping, feminist visualization, storymapping, 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.
  • Creative work of all genres that produces new and critical ways of visualizing, representing, and performing space, place, and the geographic imagination.
  • Creative work that uses geographic concepts, representations, and tools to imagine and bring into being other worlds.

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, 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 post/decolonial 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 coversheet with your submission (provided on our submissions guidelines page).  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.

Ordering Information & Past Issues

We maintain limited supply of past issues. Please contact us with any/all questions regarding ordering your copy. The archive of past issues can be found the You Are Here website.

Contact Us

For more information please contact:

Eden Kinkaid and Cassidy Schoenfelder, editors

You Are Here
School of Geography, Development & Environment
University of Arizona, ENR2 Building, South 4th floor
P.O. Box 210137, Tucson, AZ 85721-0137

Email: youarehere.arizona@gmail.com

Website: www.youareheregeography.com