Gratitude and greetings as editors depart and others arrive

In 2017 this journal, then in its 35^th year, changed focus. It became EPC: Politics & Space, an international journal of critical, heterodox, and interdisciplinary research into the relations between the political and the spatial. Alison Mountz, then of Wilfrid Laurier University and now of the University of Toronto, Canada, and I took on the editorship. We were soon joined by Patricia Daley of the University of Oxford and Joe Painter of Durham University, both in the UK. As a team, we assumed the arduous but fulfilling task of reorienting the journal—a new aims and scope, a new editorial advisory board, new internal procedures and workflows, new attempts to serve our academic community through sponsoring lectures, and creating a podcast called Minor Revisions that is dedicated to demystifying the process of writing for publication in journals like ours. During the process, we also recruited a fifth editor, Luiza Bialasiewicz of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2019.

Now, as we enter 2024, Alison, Patricia, and Joe have stepped back from their editorial positions. Their work has contributed greatly to the success of Politics & Space. We have received very kind feedback from authors, reviewers, and readers in the last few years. As with all academics, our work was greatly impacted by the COVID pandemic which struck in early 2020, just when the revamped journal was beginning to sail at full steam. Alison, Patricia, and Joe were crucial to ‘righting the ship’ in the first year of the pandemic and then keeping it on course in the time since. I can speak for Luiza when I say that we are both very grateful for Alison, Patricia, and Joe’s essential work on Politics & Space. Thank you, all three!

Any success we have managed with the journal would not have been possible without the diligence, professionalism, and patience of Katie Nudd, our Editorial Manager, Samantha Thompson, our Editorial Assistant and now a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria, Canada, Robert Rojek, Senior Publisher and, recently, Monti Rodgers, Senior Publishing Editor at SAGE. Moreover, our Editorial Board and our anonymous reviewers all deserve our gratitude too.

As we express our appreciation, words of welcome are also in order. Three new editors have joined the journal: Thom Davies of the University of Nottingham, UK; Rachel Hughes of the University of Melbourne, Australia; and Sarah Hunt, also known as Tłaliłila’ogwa, of the University of Victoria, Canada. They will work with Luiza and me to make Politics & Space as strong an outlet for quality research and as valuable a resource for our multidisciplinary community as possible. The new editors’ individual areas of research expertise will, of course, help define the journal’s scope. So, below are some brief introductions.

Thom Davies is a geographer working at the intersection of politics and the environment. He researches borders, environmental injustice, and toxic geographies. Thom has contributed to understandings of slow, epistemic, and liberal violence, and his work has explored how necropolitics, slow violence, and eco-coloniality continue to shape our uneven world.

Rachel Hughes’ research is driven by questions of memory, justice, and reparation. She is especially interested in the cultural and affective politics of socio-legal processes in place—such as truth commissions, war crimes trials, museum exhibitions, and solidarity campaigns—and their relation to internationalism, coloniality, and international development practice.

Sarah Hunt/Tłaliłila’ogwa is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Political Ecology. As a Kwakwaka’wakw scholar, Sarah’s research examines the gendered nature of justice, violence and law in settler-Indigenous relations through the co-creation of Indigenous, feminist and queer methodologies.

Welcome to Thom, Rachel, and Sarah!