A scholarly journal is a terrain of inquiry, made and maintained by authors, reviewers, editors, publishers and staff. Over the life of a journal, this terrain regularly shifts as those involved in shaping and responding to changing landscapes – of the political economy of higher education, emergent knowledges, political life, and so forth – struggle over and struggle for the stakes of academic and political debates. EPD: Society and Space has always sought to be a terrain on which scholars examine social struggles over access to and control of space, place, territory, region, and resources. Since its inception, our journal has continued to invite work that investigates and challenges the ways that modes and systems of power, difference and oppression differentially shape lives, as well as how those modes and systems are resisted, subverted and reworked. At their best, the papers we publish are theoretically ambitious, empirically robust, rooted in and contributing to a wide range of intellectual traditions.
Despite these enduring commitments, however, the terrain of critical humanistic and social science inquiry and the world it seeks to respond to and shape has profoundly changed. Since the founding of the journal, scholars in the intellectual traditions of postcolonial studies, Black studies, ethnic studies, feminist theory and queer theory have made critical interventions in the places, processes, relations and matters of concern from and about which knowledge might be credibly made. Thus, while the conceptual interests animating the journal have stayed notably constant, there have been significant shifts in the political, spatial, intellectual, and epistemological terrain they claim, as well as the analytical strategies for claiming it.