Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editorial

2011; Wiley; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00446.x

1475-5661

Alison Blunt,

Geographies of human-animal interactions

Welcome to the April issue of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Linda McDowell presented the Transactions plenary lecture at the Annual Conference of the RGS-IBG in September 2010 and her paper –‘Making a drama out of a crisis: representing financial failure, or a tragedy in five acts’– is published in this issue (McDowell 2011). Linda’s paper is a compelling and timely analysis of the financial crisis, focusing on the performative actions of individuals and their representation in various forms and narratives, including journalism, drama and film. The RGS-IBG conference theme this year is ‘The Geographical imagination.’ Stephen Daniels, the chair of conference, has written a Boundary Crossing essay addressing this theme (Daniels 2011, 182) in which he explores three kinds of positioning: ‘first, the place of imagination in fields of enquiry; second, the historical-geographical contexts of key writings on geographical imagination; and third, the physical sites and spaces where the geographical imagination is produced and disseminated’. Directly connected to the conference theme, I am delighted to announce that the 2011 Transactions plenary lecture will be presented by Peter Hulme, Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. Peter’s lecture will be on ‘Writing the land: reading Cuba through its geography,’ and draws on his AHRC-funded research ‘American Tropics: towards a literary geography.’ The fourth virtual issue of Transactions is on ‘Scale,’ and has been edited by Stephen Legg. The virtual issue – together with the other three on ‘Women and Geography,’‘The Geographies of Knowledge,’ and ‘Geomorphology’– is available free online at http://www.rgs.org/TIBGVirtual, and comprises 12 open access articles published in Transactions from 1997 to 2009, as well as links to 16 other articles. The virtual issue begins with the widely influential paper by Marston, Jones and Woodward (2005), which proposed a ‘human geography without scale,’ and a selection of commentaries on it, before turning to a range of other articles published before and since in the fields of environmental and physical geographies, economic geographies, and cultural, historical and political geographies. As Stephen writes, the virtual issue ‘brings together papers which respond to the concept of a human geography without scale, but also those from other parts of the geographical discipline, those which pre-date this debate, and those which pursue an approach to scale unaffected by the potential of flat ontologies.’ As such, the papers ‘represent geographical research and debate at its healthiest and most provocative,’ and we hope that the diversity of approaches that comprise the virtual issue ‘will provoke further debate about the continued relevance (or not) of scale to research within and beyond the geographical discipline.’ In addition to the development of virtual issues, it is also now possible to include supplementary material online when it cannot be included in the published version of papers. This appears as a new tab on the online version of papers with this kind of material. The first two papers to include supplementary material – in both cases, images – are by Tim Edensor (2011) and Andy Pike (2011), and are both published in this issue. I encourage readers to access the supplementary material alongside the text of the articles, and for authors to think about ways in which including such material (datasets and multimedia material, for example, as well as additional images) can enhance their submitted papers. Finally, this issue ends with a list of over 300 people who have reviewed papers for Transactions in 2010. I would like to thank everyone for giving their time and expertise so generously in reviewing papers for the journal. Throughout my time as editor, I have been enormously impressed by the quality of reviews and the professionalism of reviewers. Journals like Transactions simply wouldn’t exist without this level of peer review, and I am very grateful to reviewers for providing excellent, full and constructive guidance both for authors and for me in coming to editorial decisions.