In January 2024, the AAG welcomes Anastasia Christou as the new GeoHumanities editor, joining Joshua Inwood, whose term as GeoHumanities editor began in January 2023. Inwood and Christou are replacing outgoing and founding GeoHumanities editors Deborah P. Dixon and Tim Cresswell.

Christou is professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Middlesex University, London, UK. Her work is immersed in the critical geography, humanities, social sciences, and the arts, seeking to create “a public sociology which is relevant, meaningful and transformative,” she says. She has published widely on issues of migration and mobilities; citizenship and ethnicity; space and place; transnationalism and identity; culture and memory, gender and feminism; inequalities and austerity; postsocialism; home, belonging and exclusion; emotion and narrativity; youth and aging; sexualities; translocal geographies; affect, care and trauma; motherhood and mothering; women, men and masculinities; racisms and intersectionalities; gendered violence and social media; tourism mobilities; material culture; academic exclusion and solidarity; educational inequalities; embodiment. Christou is co-author with Eleonore Kofman of Gender & Migration (Springer, 2022), and co-author with Russell King of Counter-diaspora: The Greek Second Generation Returns ‘Home’ (Harvard University Press, 2015). She brings to her editorship significant experience editing book volumes and journal special issues, and serves on the international board of journals in the US and Europe. Her multi-sited, multi-method, and comparative ethnographic research in more than a dozen countries includes Narratives of the Greek Civil War: Memory and Political Identities as Public History; and the poem “Ruination,” anthologized in The Other Side of Hope.

“In assuming editorship of GeoHumanities, I am inspired by a commitment to ensuring critical and interdisciplinary advances in knowledge production,” says Christou. “I would also like to attract and encourage more global scholarship in the journal.” 

Inwood is a professor in the Department of Geography and The Rock Ethics Institute at the Pennsylvania State University. His research and teaching are focused on the social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate exploitation and injustice with a specific focus on the US South. His work explores racial capitalism and the broad trajectories of white supremacy. In addition, his work has engaged with the U.S. civil rights struggle and a broad understanding of the geography of the American Civil Rights struggle. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and his work has been recognized with several AAG honors including the Glenda Laws Award and the AAG’s media achievement award. He has authored or co-authored over fifty peer-reviewed journal articles and is co-editor of the volume Non-Killing Geographies: Violence, Space, and the Search for a More Humane Geography (Center for Global Non-Killing, 2011) and has a forthcoming co-edited book on Geographies of Justice (Bristol University Press 2024). He brings to his editorship at GeoHumanities an awareness of the intersection of geography, humanist value systems and human rights, politics, and history.

“At no point in the last 50 years have the humanities been more central to a series of unfolding political crises across the globe,” Inwood says, citing recent high-profile debates about public monuments, education about historic and contemporary acts of oppression, and the need to counteract anti-democratic forces that have mobilized in many nations. “I will strive to build on the last decade of significant scholarship in the journal and engage in this contemporary moment.”

The AAG would like to express its appreciation for the work of cultural geographer Tim Cresswell and feminist political geographer Deborah P. Dixon to establish GeoHumanities and develop its articles and readership since 2015.

Cresswell is Ogilvie Professor of Human Geography in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on geographies of place and mobility and their role in the constitution of social and cultural life. He is the author or editor of a dozen books and over 100 articles on the role of space, place, and mobility in social and cultural life. Cresswell is also a widely published poet with three collections – most recently Plastiglomerate (Penned in the Margins, 2020). His most recent academic book, Muybridge and Mobility (co-authored with John Ott) was published by the University of California Press in 2022. 

Deborah Dixon is Professor of Geography at the University of Glasgow. Dixon’s internationally recognized work in feminist geopolitics was instrumental to the emergence of geohumanities as an inter-disciplinary field of research and practice. Her work cuts across scientific, artistic, and cultural categories to examine and imagine the ecological and social presence and futures of landscapes and places. Her collaborations include Sustainable Extractive Landscape Futures, working with earth scientists and artists on the conceptual and practical work of ‘fast geology’ in the Anthropocene, specifically in extractive landscapes. Dixon specializes in researching aesthetic, technological, political, and cultural responses to environmental problematics (including toxic landscapes, loss of biodiversity, and climate change) in Europe, the US, Australia and Asia. Her book Feminist Geopolitics: Material States (2016, Routledge) set the tone for investigations of feminist geopolitics and ecologies. A follow-up monograph will interrogate possible futures for the Earth created by viral and drone phenomena, geoengineering, and toxic exposures. She is also engaged in collaborative work that juxtaposes and recomposes citizen science, humanitarian technologies, and ethics in Malawi.

GeoHumanities has published 18 issues since its beginnings in 2015. As Dixon recalls, the journal was “broadly conceived … as a venue wherein the diverse and proliferating engagements between the geographical sciences and the arts and humanities could be showcased.” GeoHumanities has highlighted research from “environmental humanities; the body and well-being; place and performativity; big data and neogeographies; history and memory; creativity, experimentation, and innovation; media and film studies; religion, belief, and the cosmos; and landscape and architecture.” While most of these have been articles, GeoHumanities has welcomed experimentations with form, combined media, and creative collaborations. Dixon recalls that the journal’s ‘Practices and Curations’ section has been the most innovative area of the publication, featuring research based on creative practice, as well as work produced during inquiry.

From the beginning, GeoHumanities was conceived to have a team of two co-editors. The founding team of Dixon and Cresswell drew Dixon’s experience in combining art and science, in particular her work with geo- and environmental scientists; and Cresswell’s humanities experience in the history of geography and his work as a poet. The range of work this team wished to attract to GeoHumanities—from Anthropocene geographies to spatial histories— called on further expertise from associate editors Sarah De Leeuw, Harriet Hawkins, Chris Lukinbeal, and Matt Zook, as well as an interdisciplinary editorial board and attentive reviewers.

In their first editorial for GeoHumanities in 2015, Cresswell and Dixon noted that the birth of the journal was emblematic of the long history of interdisciplinary, humanist work in geography, “endeavors that saw cultural geography become both a mainstay of the discipline and an arena where dialogue with other disciplines was encouraged and facilitated.” Cresswell dedicated the journal to “grasp the opportunity provided by the array of creative writers, artists, performers, and musicians who engage with geographical ideas in their work…That, to me, would be a fine thing for a confident and outward-looking radically interdisciplinary discipline such as ours.”

AAG thanks Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon for their vision and leadership during the founding and subsequent eight years of editorship and commends Anastasia Christou and Joshua Inwood for their willingness to continue the tradition established by the founding editors.

Find out more about GeoHumanities and other AAG journals.

Guo Chen has been named the first Human Geography/Nature and Society editor for The Professional Geographer, inaugurating a new position at the journal. Chen will join current editor Heejun Chang, who will continue in his second term as editor, focusing on articles related to Geographic Methods/Physical Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Chen is an associate professor of Geography and Global Urban Studies in the College of Social Science, a core faculty member of the Asian Pacific American (APA) Studies Program, and an affiliated faculty member of the Asian Studies Center and Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University. A human geographer with broad interests in urban, economic, crititical, and environmental areas, she is also a teacher scholar and public intellectual who has authored and co-authored over 50 publications with a focus on inequality, urban poverty, housing rights for the poor, slums, migrants, urbanization and land use, urban governance, and social and environmental justice, including articles in The Professional Geographer and other leading geography journals. She is co-editor of Locating Right to the City in the Global South (Routledge 2013) and “Interrogating unequal rights to the Chinese city” (Environment and Planning A Special Issue based on her initiated sessions at the AAG meeting), as well as initiator and editor of a Focus Section for The Professional Geographer titled “Hidden Geographies: Migration, Intersectionality, and Social Justice in a Global Contemporaneous Space” (2023) featuring research articles on race, gender, ethnicity, class, nationality, citizenship, and social justice, by ten diverse scholars around the world. Her public scholarship includes many op-eds for key policy forums and her professional society, TV interview, and webinars. She has served on geography/urban studies flagship journals’ editorial boards (The Professional Geographer and Journal of Urban Affairs), serving as ad hoc reviewer for close to 50 journals, many programs and book publishers, and over a hundred organized professional sessions, invited talks, and conference presentations. Guo is a recipient of many prestigious awards in research, teaching, leadership, and service, including a Wilson Center Fellowship, university-wide teaching and women’s professional achievement awards, and an AAG specialty group outstanding service award.

Chen got a glimpse of the editorial role at Professional Geographer as a guest editor of a Focus section in 2023 and 2024/25 issues of the journal on the theme of Hidden Geographies. Her experiences have strengthened her vision for helping the journal to achieve valuable dialogue between the Global South and the Global North, and for attracting and publishing underrepresented authors in geography. “As I learned from editing our recent PG Focus section, the highest-impact articles increasingly need to speak to a diverse and international geography readership and the communities beyond,” says Chen. “My vision for the journal is to continue to bring in a diverse scholarship and to continue to stimulate communication, awareness, and exchange.”

Find out more about The Professional Geographer and other AAG journals.

Paul Adams is the new editor for Human Geography, and Brian King is the new Nature & Society editor at the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, effective January 2024. They will replace Kendra Strauss and Katie Meehan, respectively.

Adams is the longtime director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Texas, first in the UT Department of Geography and the Environment now in the Department of American Studies. His service to AAG includes founding the Media Geography Specialty Group (now Media and Communication). From 2015 to 2020, he served as associate professor II at the University of Bergen, funded by the Research Council of Norway. In 2001, he was a Fulbright fellow at McGill University and University of Montreal, Quebec. His current research focuses on sociospatial and political aspects of digital media, digital humanities, and culturally specific understandings of environmental risk and climate change.

Adams is the author of three monographs: The Boundless Self: Communication in Physical and Virtual Spaces (Syracuse University Press, 2005); Atlantic Reverberations: French Representations of an American Election (Ashgate Press, 2007); and Geographies of Media and Communication: A Critical Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), which received the 2009 James W. Carey Media Research Award from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research, and has been translated into Chinese. He has also served as co-editor of four volumes: Textures of Place with Steven Hoelscher and Karen E. Till (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); the Ashgate Research Companion to Media Geography with Jim Craine and Jason Dittmer (Routledge, 2014); Disentangling: The Geographies of Digital Disconnection with André Jansson (Oxford University Press, 2021); and the Routledge Handbook on Media Geographies with Barney Warf (2021).

Adams will devote his editorship in Human Geography to illuminating “the synthetic potentials” of cross- and interdisciplinary explorations in geography: “Emerging geographical approaches, including feminist geography, decolonial geography, studies of affect and emotion, embodied theory, political ecology, and others are not so much ‘specializations’ as new encounters with central questions of the discipline, and as such they offer new ways to synthesize diverse perspectives on the world.” As AAG’s flagship journal, the Annals’s unique task of representing the full breadth of geography can be applied to embracing, rather than entrenching, the disciplinary and methodological differences in the field: “Geography is growing but not necessarily growing apart,” says Adams. “The Annals is key to promoting this process.”

King is professor and head of the Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. His affiliations range across the university, as a faculty research associate with the Population Research Institute, research affiliate with the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and faculty affiliate with the School of International Affairs and Consortium on Substance Use and Addiction. King is an honorary research associate with the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town and was selected as a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow in 2017. He previously served from 2021 to 2023 as co-editor of Human Geography and Nature & Society for the Annals. King’s research, teaching, and outreach focuses on livelihoods, conservation and development, environmental change, and human health, centering in Southern Africa. King’s laboratory group (HELIX: Health and Environment Landscapes for Interdisciplinary eXchange) is examining how COVID-19 is transforming the US opioid epidemic. His book, States of Disease: Political Environments and Human Health University of California Press, 2017), received the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award.

King’s goals as editor include making sure the review process is timely and efficient, acting from his knowledge of the process as a reviewer and as an editorial board member of African Geographical Review, Geoforum and Health & Place. He also seeks to expand the range of the publication to include even more work in emerging directions, and to address underrepresented content areas that can advance the future of nature and society geography.

Related to this commitment is King’s interest in broadening the scope of contributors’ disciplinary backgrounds. “One of the unexpected outcomes of my research in health and environment are the ways that I am increasingly engaging with other disciplines, particularly anthropology, sociology, rural sociology, and biobehavioral health,” he says. King plans to leverage his many commitments and professional contacts outside of geography to widely promote the Annals to potential contributors.

The AAG thanks outgoing editors Kendra Strauss, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and associate member of the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University, as well as director of the Labour Studies Program and the SFU Morgan Centre for Labour Research; and Katie Meehan, Reader in Environment and Society in the Department of Geography at King’s College London and Co-Director of King’s Water Center, for their dedicated editorship.

Strauss brought to the role of editor their significant publications in economic and labor geographies, feminist theory, migration studies, legal geographies, environmental change, urban political ecology, and critical urban theory. With extensive publications in geography, social science, and law journals, Strauss has also served on six editorial boards and been a reviewer for many papers in and beyond geography. Strauss’s tenure with the Annals was characterized by encouragement of paper submissions from outside of North America and in diverse topics areas “that still evidence a commitment to engagement with geography and geographical debate.”

Meehan is a broadly trained human-environment geographer with expertise in urban political ecology, environmental justice, water policy, mixed methods, and science and technology studies. She is co-author of Water: A Critical Introduction (Wiley, 2023), with Naho Mirumachi, Alex Loftus, and Majed Akhter. She is co-editor with Kendra Strauss of Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction (University of Georgia Press, 2015). In 2023 she won the European Research Council’s Consolidator Grant award to support her research on household water insecurity and water shutoffs in high-income countries. During her time at the Annals, Meehan sought to democratize knowledge and expand the audiences for the journal, beyond the geography discipline and beyond academia. She encouraged the use of Annals as a platform for key debates in the discipline and worked with the other editors to bring human-environment topics into the foreground, especially work that focused on racialized natures and environmental justice. “I have been thrilled to work with the editorial board, my co-editors, AAG staff, and the AAG Council to shepherd the very best geographic scholarship to the pages of the Annals,” Meehan says.

Find out more about the Annals of the American Association of Geographers and other AAG journals.