Struggling for a Right to the Discipline

The allegations revealed through Al Jazeera’s recent investigative journalism saddened and sickened us all. Antipode’s Editorial Collective and the Antipode Foundation’s board of trustees expect all editors, International Advisory Board members, referees and authors to do no harm. We should not have to spell out what this means, but our forward-thinking colleagues at the Royal Geographical Society and American Association of Geographers have formulated helpful codes of conduct that we endorse.

As editors, we are responsible for the intellectual, political, scientific, aesthetic, and ethical standard of published papers. While we will not, going forward, work with or support a scholar in light of multiple allegations of harm, we are not in a position to adjudicate cases of misconduct that occur beyond the bounds of our own publishing process, nor to retract already-published papers in such a case. We continue to work through the contradictions of these processes as we strive to shepherd the evolving archive of radical geography.

In August 2019, the Antipode Foundation, led by then-trustees Melissa Wright and Wendy Larner, and current chair Jenny Pickerill, started a conversation about a “Right to the Discipline”. Our thinking then was that notwithstanding the efforts of many brilliant and brave, committed and often unrecognised individuals, Geography has largely failed, and in many cases even resisted, calls within its own ranks to acknowledge the influence of racism, sexism, cis-heteronormativity, ableism, classism, and related hatreds, on the making and practices of the field. We also acknowledged that Antipode, over its five decades as a journal and now Foundation, has too often (and often unknowingly) played a part in advancing the careers of those committing harm and driving racist, patriarchal, cis-heteronormative, and ableist exclusions.

With the help of Antipode’s Editorial Collective, the Foundation was able to launch a first call for proposals in September 2020 (and a second in 2021: https://antipodeonline.org/a-right-to-the-discipline/), seeking applications for grants of up to £10,000 to amplify the voices of those often unheard and invisibilised in the discipline – those “outside the project”. We aimed to support the demands of those pushing for thoroughgoing change in academic workplaces, classrooms, conferences, job interviews, journals, research funders, and myriad other sites where unsustainable demands and problematic practices exist (indeed, flourish).

The “Right to the Discipline” grants are part of an on-going process to grapple with the exclusions and harms that have been part of Radical Geography’s past and likely (unfortunately) its future. Antipode’s editors are stewards of an archive made up of the combined energies of those authors who submit work to us and the reviewers who so generously engage with their scholarship. We continue our commitment to support scholars who are structurally insecure, vulnerable, or preyed upon in academia, and to support scholarship that grapples with the harmful practices of authors and institutions that have contributed to our archive. We stand with those who put themselves at risk to name harmful behaviour and demand change.

The Antipode Editorial Collective and Antipode Foundation’s trustees

November 2021

Comments

  1. DJ

    “we are not in a position to adjudicate cases of misconduct that occur beyond the bounds of our own publishing process, nor to retract already-published papers in such a case”

    Some individual board members come from the Universities where breaches of trust were committed and reported, so their obligations and interest may actually extend further than the journal’s.

    As for removing articles, the last three by the accused geographer are all author’s copyright, so you can retract them and ‘pass them back’ to the author[s]. The journal is almost completely online now. Scopus and Web of Science listings, and other archiving mechanisms, will cope. Happens in STEM disciplines all the time.

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  2. Antipode Editorial Office Post author

    Following the Committee on Publication Ethics’ “Retraction Guidelines” (https://publicationethics.org/files/cope-retraction-guidelines-v2.pdf), we understand retraction primarily as a “mechanism for correcting the literature and alerting readers to articles that contain such seriously flawed or erroneous content or data that their findings and conclusions cannot be relied upon […] The main purpose of retraction is to correct the literature and ensure its integrity”.

    Retraction may also be used “to alert readers to cases of redundant publication, plagiarism, peer review manipulation, reuse of material or data without authorisation, copyright infringement or some other legal issue (e.g. libel, privacy, illegality), unethical research, and/or a failure to disclose a major competing interest that would have unduly influenced interpretations or recommendations”.

    To retract already-published papers, there would need to be evidence of research misconduct and/or a breach of publication ethics. As we say in the above statement, we continue to work through the contradictions of these processes as we strive to shepherd the evolving archive of radical geography.

    Reply