Three arrivals, two departures, and a new issue for May Day

We’ve just published issue 3 of volume 51 of Antipode. Like so many – indeed, most – issues, it covers a lot of ground, surveying a landscape including financialisation, squatting, climate change, migration, housing politics, Indigenous dispossession, colonial violence, gentrification, neoliberal urbanism, territorial stigma, spatial imaginaries, Israel/Palestine, the new municipalism, land grabbing, and academic geography itself (among other things). One might well wonder why – why bring all this together, why here? One answer to the question comes from the May Day Manifesto:

We believe that the system we now oppose can only survive by a willed separation of issues, and the resulting fragmentation of consciousness. Our own first position is that all the issues – industrial and political, international and domestic, economic and cultural, humanitarian and radical – are deeply connected; that what we oppose is a political, economic and social system; that what we work for is a different whole society. The problems of whole men and women are now habitually relegated to specialized and disparate fields, where the society offers to manage or adjust them by this or that consideration or technique. Against this, we define socialism again as a humanism: a recognition of the social reality of man in all his activities, and of the consequent struggle for the direction of this reality by and for ordinary men and women. (May Day Manifesto Committee 2018: 4)

The May Day Manifesto was first published in 1968, and re-issued by Verso in 2018 to celebrate its 50th anniversary. The point, we take it, was that such synthetic thinking remains necessary today, that perhaps it’s needed now more than ever. This year we’re celebrating 50 years of Antipode’s contribution to the struggle – we’ve been publishing some of the best and most provocative radical geography for half a century, composing, in one place, a multitude of perspectives on myriad matters of concern.

The journal is, to be sure, more diverse today than it was in 1969, but arguably we’ve always welcomed the infusion of new ideas and the shaking-up of old positions through dialogue and debate, never being committed to just one view of critical analysis or politics. Antipode has continuously pushed at the boundaries of radical geographical thinking, critiquing and challenging settled orthodoxies, putting new research or critical analyses to work to contribute to strengthening a Left politics broadly defined.

The journal’s brilliant Editorial Collective is at the centre of all this. To foster its breadth in over the next half-century, we’ve increased the number of editors in recent years, first from four to five and now to six. Today we say goodbye to Katherine McKittrick and Tariq Jazeel, and hello not only to their “replacements”, Alex Loftus and Laura Barraclough, but also to Josh Barkan, who’s joining the International Advisory Board.

Katherine and Tariq have been tireless and peerless custodians of the journal, handling almost 1,000 submissions between them and often going beyond the call of duty as mentors to early career researchers. They were also central to the production of Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, our free-to-download collection of 50 essays on critical geography’s histories, current condition and possible future directions; their introduction to it stands as a fitting testimony to the role that they have played in the flourishing of Antipode in the last six years.

Laura and Alex will be joining Nik Theodore, Kiran Asher, Dave Featherstone and Marion Werner in editing the journal. Their scholarship on productions of, and challenges to, colonialism, racism, sexism, and class inequality, and political ecology, the right to water, Marxism, and financialisation, respectively, will be well known to many readers, and you’ll be hearing more them in the coming months and years.