Collaborations: joint plenary editorial introduction

In collaboration with the Black Geographies Specialty Group, the editors of cultural geographies and Political Geography are pleased to co-present our 2023 annual plenary lectures. ‘The work of repair: land, relation, and pedagogy’ by Tianna Bruno, Andrew Curley, Mabel Denzin Gergan and Sara Smith is published in this section of cultural geographies, and Jovan Scott Lewis’s ‘Black life beyond injury: Relational repair and the reparative conjuncture’ is simultaneously published in Political Geography. The plenaries are joined by corresponding commentaries by Sara Zaragocin and Pat Noxolo, as well as the plenary lecturers commenting on one anothers’ lectures.

Both lectures and their co-publication emerge out of a packed, joint plenary session at the 2023 annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Denver, Colorado on Saturday the 25th of March 2023. The joint plenary session, co-hosted by the Black Geographies Specialty Group and both journals, centred around the important geographical themes of repair and reparation, and which also spoke to the annual conference’s over-arching theme, ‘Towards More Just Geographies’. Both plenary lectures unequivocally speak to demands for geography’s disciplinary responsibility to reparative justice as much as they map ways to realise reparation and repair. They also feature scholars whose work is building bridges across the sub-disciplines each journal represents, in the process transforming how we think, practice and ‘be’ as geographers.

Our co-publication and co-hosting of plenary lectures is a necessary first (to our knowledge) for geography. The editors of cultural geographies and Political Geography come together as friends. That’s important because too often our publishers and our academic institutions see us in competition. We feel we don’t need to see one-another in that light.

Indeed, our collaboration in inviting and co-hosting with the Black Geographies Speciality Group, and subsequently co-publishing the talks, required working together in the interests of the discipline, our journals’ shared commitments to more just and reparative geographies, and to our responsibility to think, practice and balance our work as academics, writers, teachers and administrators carefully.

Our capacity and desire to collaborate reminds us that acrimonious division and competition are created and sustained by nothing more or less than our everyday practices and interactions with each other. The potential to create new ways of practicing and publishing geography together is more important and necessary than ever. The work of repair in the discipline, the work of building what Natalie Oswin calls an ‘other’ geography, moves in fits and starts. ¹ We have a window where we can break down barriers, where we can build the kind of discipline we want, not through our words but through our actions, and we hope our joint plenaries can make a small contribution to these efforts.

We encourage our readers to read the lecture by Tianna, Andrew, Mabel and Sara, along with the generous commentaries by Jovan and Sofia. And then to head over to Political Geography to read Jovan’s lecture, together with the commentaries there by Pat Noxolo and Tianna and co. We feel the lectures and commentaries make up a crucial and critical suite of important contributions to the discipline. We also hope the friendly collaboration of their co-publication marks a moment of coming together for responsive, collaborative, reparative and perhaps also more just geographical futures.