We’re delighted to be continuing our symposium series with this collection of responses to the Participatory Geographies Research Group’s ‘Communifesto for Fuller Geographies: Towards Mutual Security’. PyGyRG is a research group of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers); following the RGS-IBG annual international conference in July, its members collectively penned what they call a ‘communifesto’ in August, thinking about ‘the insecurity of geography/geographers’ insecurities’.

The communifesto offers a set of strategies and tactics at a time when academic life feels precarious, individualistic, and relentlessly competitive, when many radicals feel discontented with, maladjusted to and estranged from the academy. It’s a self-consciously “embryonic” document – a “communiqué”; a “work in progress” – “something we can continue to develop” as critical scholars resist and refuse harmful new developments in the university and creatively and constructively struggle for personal and disciplinary security.

In September Antipode invited seven responses to the communifesto, interventions which would pull at its threads not to unravel them but to spin them on or stitch them into something new. The responses are as creative and constructive as the piece that stimulated them, but are certainly not uncritical; we present them here and invite you, the reader, to join the conversation by commenting below. In a month or two, PyGyRG will reply and, we hope, the communifesto will develop as a living resource.

Communifesto for Fuller Geographies: Towards Mutual Security – Participatory Geographies Research Group

Responses

Towards Much Fuller, More Politically Engaged Geographies: Some Thoughts on the Communifesto of the Participatory Geographies Research Group – Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (SUNY New Paltz)

From Café Communism to Bureaucratic Aikido – Iain Hay and Michael Scott (Flinders University)

Educational Restructuring and Strategic Partnerships – Rich Heyman (University of Texas at Austin)

Responses to a Communifesto – Sara Kindon (Victoria University of Wellington)

Survival and Subversion in the Neoliberal University – Natascha Klocker (University of Wollongong) and Danielle Drozdzewski (University of New South Wales)

Taking Stock in the Interim: The Stuck, the Tired, and the Exhausted – Pamela Moss (University of Victoria)

Schools of Our Own – Mark Purcell (University of Washington)

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Many thanks to Kelvin Mason, Kye Askins and everyone at PyGyRG, and to all of our respondents.