Geographers, get blogging

We’ve circulated calls for contributions to AntipodeFoundation.org before (see here), inviting interventions which either link published research to contemporary matters of concern or simply sketch out what it’s all about, why it matters, and where it might go to next. We invite such submissions in the hope that they not only draw attention to published research but also offer notes towards further investigations or the introduction to future discussions – threads to be drawn out and spun on in new, and perhaps collaborative, work. As Martin Weller, author of The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice, puts it, blogs offer “room for experimentation and potential to connect”.

Interested in how this is going, we recently looked at the number of full-text downloads of Antipode papers featured, in one way or another, on AntipodeFoundation.org

For example, we published an interview with the authors of ‘Negotiating Difference Through Everyday Encounters: The Case of Sexual Orientation and Religion and Belief’ – the University of Leeds’ Gill Valentine and Louise Waite – on 9 March this year, and full-text downloads from Wiley Online Library (their article was first published online on 5 January 2011) increased quite dramatically. Who knows whether or not this will lead to the above mentioned ‘further investigations’ and ‘future discussions’, but it’s a good start.

Similarly, full-text downloads of Fenda Akiwumi’s ‘Global Incorporation and Local Conflict: Sierra Leonean Mining Regions’ (first published online on 21 September 2011) rose considerably when our interview with her was posted on 8 May 2012. See the following cases also…

State Power, Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier: The Politics of the Commons in Karachi’ by Nausheen Anwar; video abstract posted on 10 April 2012; article first published online on 20 July 2011

Translation Alignment: Actor-Network Theory, Resistance, and the Power Dynamics of Alliance in New Caledonia’ by Leah Horowitz; video abstract posted on 2 May 2012; article first published online on 3 August 2011

Transition Urbanism and the Contested Politics of Ethical Place Making’ by Kelvin Mason and Mark Whitehead; video abstract posted on 26 February 2012, included in virtual issue posted on 20 June 2012 and symposium posted on 22 June 2012; article first published online on 14 February 2011.

Worker Co-operatives and Spaces of Possibility: An Investigation of Subject Space at Collective Copies’ by Janelle Cornwell; video abstract posted on 18 April 2012 and included in virtual issue posted on 20 June 2012; article first published online on 21 September 2011.

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In an interesting and important report, The New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere (available at The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, a blog founded in 2007 in conjunction with the US Social Science Research Council) its co-author Ruth Braunstein argues that “…scholarly work can be refined through an interplay between blogging and more traditional scholarly media…[There’s] potential for such sites to serve not only as forms of publicity for finished scholarly work, but also as part of an ongoing, collective, and public endeavour to advance knowledge”. AntipodeFoundation.org, it seems, certainly publicises finished scholarly work; let’s hope it plays a part in that ongoing and collective endeavour to advance knowledge too.

Whether you’re an Antipode author or not, please do get in touch with contributions – antipode@live.co.uk

Comments

  1. Arn Kawano

    The cutting edge of socialist theory is inaccessible to activists and the public who do not have frequent access to a leading library that has print or online subscriptions to Antipode, Capital & Class, Critique, Historical Materialism, The Journal of Labor & Society, Monthly Review, New Left Review, Rethinking Marxism. Review of Radical Political Economy, Science & Society, Socialism & Democracy, Socialist History, and World Review of Political Economy. I subscribe to many of these but I can’t afford to subscribe to all of them (including Antipode) and I am sure to have missed other important journals. I understand that you academics need to publish and participate in scholarly journals or perish but something must be done to assist the activist who does not have convenient access to a university library. This contradiction of the capitalist university system is preserving the hegemony of capitalism as socialist theoreticians in various academic specialties are left talking to themselves in isolation from members of other journals as well as the activists and public they wish to reach.

    Reply
  2. Antipode Editorial Office Post author

    Thanks for the comment. One thing to say immediately is that many if not most authors would be happy to share copies of their journal articles, conference papers, and the like if contacted – but this practice, of course, doesn’t even begin to deal with some of the troubling ethics and politics of publishing as we know it!
    For those interested in this, there are some excellent resources available at The Guardian (here and here), Times Higher Education, and the Impact of Social Sciences blog (here, here and here), among other places, and http://openaccess.eprints.org/ and http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/ are well worth a read.
    And closer to home for geographers, both Political Geography and Geoforum have recently published provocative interventions on publishers’ business models and open access publishing.

    Reply
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