This is a call for papers (CFP) for CFP Mapping Desire – 25 years on: legacies, lessons, and lacunae (May & Sep 2020), part of the Conference of Irish Geographers (pre-conference symposium and conference 20-23rd May 2020, Dublin Ireland) and Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers (1st September-4th September 2020 London, England).
The year 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Mapping Desire edited by David Bell and Gill Valentine. This edited book was the first collection of geographical work on sexuality, and has long played and continues to play a key role in cohering and legitimizing the geographies of sexualities/queer geographies as a distinct subfield within the academic study of Geography (at least within the Anglophone countries of the Minority World).
We believe it is important to acknowledge this anniversary in order to celebrate this ground-breaking work, tracing its influence on subsequent work …
It’s that season again: Skype and Zoom links are being clicked through in email inboxes, along with actual phone numbers being dialed, in order to participate in preliminary academic job interviews. Many friends and colleagues I know and love are aching through the process of those interviews (as well as on-campus interviews–go, peeps, go). I too once carefully created a convincing-enough library behind me, selected my shirt and jacket much more carefully than the pants no one could see under my desk, and tested my Wifi connection about a thousand times while shakily breathing over my Mac. I wished this process would be easier and, eventually, I found it to be easier by approaching the interviews differently and with different preparation techniques. In fact, once I figured out and then took up a handful of practices, I felt a greater sense of trust in myself as a scholar and determined …
As an editorial collective member of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies and as someone who once managed WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly for three years, I know how difficult it is to find appropriate and available peer reviewers. I often seek out graduate candidates (ABD students) who would offer that strong expertise but may not have the have reviewed journal articles or many journal articles before. I remember how awkward and nervous I was–and how many, many hours I devoted (oy)–when I wrote my first peer reviews.
Thanks to various search engines, I’ve read quite a few posts on how to write peer reviews. Many of them are written by publishers, peer review corporations (yeeghads!), or from other academics. These are all helpful in that they structure the work of peer review, but I found the former to be too detailed and formal, and then more anxiety-producing …
As of today, I’ve joined the Department of Geography of the University of Kentucky. I am thrilled to be on this new adventure in my work. While I was hired with a focus on digital geographies, I will be still be devoted to my feminist and queer research and teaching. My spring courses will be an introductory undergrad course, Digital Mapping (re-versioned from the pedagogy of Wilson and Zook; how fun), and a grad seminar, Social Geography: Geographies of Queer Theory. The latter will give me a chance to have conversations with geography grad students about how they read the geographies of queer theory. Scholars like C. Riley Snorton (Nebraska, the church), E. Patrick Johnson (the South), Eve Sedgwick (the closet), Ann Cvetkovich (the archive), Michael Warner (publics), Lauren Berlant (the nation), and so on have always put geography forward but with little consideration of geographic thought and theory …
