Human Geography
HG is a forum for all kinds of therotical praxis like Marxism, anarchism, post-Marxism, post-structuralism, post-coloniality, feminism, queer theory that challenges exploitation and oppression in any form. HG hopes to radicalize the academia by producing knowledge that is life-transforming because it aligns with the exploited in intellectually critiqing class supremacy, imperialism, racism, sexism, war, genocide, and destruction of the environment. In producing knowledge that is radically critical of the status quo, it hopes to challenge class-power, state-power, corporate power, racism, patriarchy, homophobia and therefore, challenge capitalist social reality.
HG was founded by Richard Peet with his graduate students at Clark University. The first issue of the journal was published in early 2008. Richard Peet served as the editor of the journal from 2008 through 2018. The vision was to provide an intellectual space for graduate students, and radical academics to fearlessly publish their point of view about the world written in an engaging and interesting manner without having to pander to citation politics, bow to academic censorship, and having to mute their ideological fervor. The founders of the journal were of the opinion that graduate students and early career academics of leftist/Marxist disposition were finding it increasingly difficult to get favorable reviews from anonymous reviewers that often in the name of ‘publishability,’ squeezed the revolutionary passion right out of the articles. Keeping this in mind, HG was started as a challenge to academic status quo in addition to all other forms of elitism. In this way, HG attempts a dialectical praxis—changing the world by challenging the nature of academic knowledge production, afterall, the material and ideological are inseparable.
The very first issue of Human Geography, published in 2008, set the precedent for inclusivity and diversity in representation of radical scholarship in the journal. In this first issue, while Derek Gregory focused on the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics in examining conflict in Baghdad, Utsa Patnaik used quantitative techniques in her paper to analyze the reasons for declining incomes and nutritional standards of agriculture-dependent populations in India. While Richard Peet engaged with concepts proposed by Marx, Hilferding and Harvey in examining global finance capital, the book reviews focused on post-structural feminism, race theory and radical activism. And over the years, HG has become a venue where scholars like David Harvey, Diana Liverman, Neil Smith, Michael Watts, James K. Gailbraith, Utsa Patnaik, Noura Erakat, Kevin Cox, Noel Castree, Nancy Ettlinger, Patrick Bond, Baburam Bhattarai, and several others have chosen to publish their research, reviews and ideas.
Human Geography (HG) is broadly conceived to cover topics ranging from economic, urban, social, cultural and geopolitical issues. Therefore, HG is committed to an array of research ranging from political economy, to cultural economy to political ecology. It is envisaged as a well-written, critical, political, and intellectually rich journal that can be read in its entirety, stimulate debates and spark social change.
The critical politics that fueled the radical geography movement is being dissipated in philosophical-theoretical aestheticization and niceties, and empirical evasions. Particularly, articles written from specifically Marxian and post-Marxian/post-structural philosophical-theoretical and political positions face a difficult time – young academics have to deny their radical politics to get published. Thus, HG consciously favors political as well as theoretically-based articles from various left positions that include Marxist-Socialist positions, in addition to feminist, queer, anarchist, anti-racist, postcolonial, anticolonial, subaltern and any newly emerging critical thought.
Additionally, HG is a forum to respond to the difficult and wide range of urgent social and political questions thrown up by capitalist globalization that are not being fully addressed in an increasingly neoliberalizing and commodified academia. Some of the most basic issues (the Iraq invasion, Afghanistan catastrophe, the war induced refugee crisis, global finance capitalism, poverty, famine, imperialism, consumption or capitalism induced environmental crisis) are hardly mentioned in the existing journals. Hence, we favor a new, more extensive and politically inclusive journal of broadly, but very politically, conceived Human Geography.
| Richard Peet | Clark University, USA |
| Waquar Ahmed | University of North Texas, USA |
| Ipsita Chatterjee | University of North Texas, USA |
| Raju Das | York University, Canada |
| Camilla Royle | Kings College London and London School of Economics, UK |
| Salvatore Engel-DiMauro | State University of New York, New Paltz, USA |
| Nancy Ettlinger | The Ohio State University, USA |
| Clayton F. Rosati | Bowling Green State University, USA |
| Jayson Funke | City University of New York, USA |
| B. S. Butola | Jawaharlal Nehru University, India |
| Brian M. Napoletano | Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México |
| Harvey Neo | The Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore |
| Anitra Nelson | The University of Melbourne, Australia |
| Alexander A. Dunlap | University of Helsinki, Finland |
| John Agnew | University of California, Los Angeles, USA |
| Derek Alderman | The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA |
| Patrick Bond | University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa |
| Kevin Cox | Ohio State University, USA |
| Annette Desmarais | University of Manitoba, Canada |
| Noura Erakat | Rutgers University, USA |
| Nancy Ettlinger | The Ohio State University, USA |
| Alistair Fraser | Maynooth University, Ireland |
| Emily Gilbert | University of Toronto, Canada |
| Ruthie Gilmore | City University of New York, USA |
| Jim Glassman | University of British Columbia, Canada |
| Sara Gonzalez | University of Leeds, UK |
| Derek Gregory | University of British Columbia, Canada |
| Costis Hadjimichalis | Harokopio University, Athens, Greece |
| David Harvey | City University of New York, USA |
| Andy Herod | University of Georgia, USA |
| Nik Heynen | University of Georgia, USA |
| Qingzhi Huan | School of Marxism, Peking University, Beijing, China |
| Maria Kaika | University of Manchester, UK |
| Mazen Labban | Rutgers University, USA |
| Alex Loftus | Royal Holloway College, UK |
| Bernardo Mançano Fernandes | State University of Sao Paulo, Brasil |
| Brent McCusker | West Virginia University, USA |
| Beverley Mullings | University of Toronto, Canada |
| Sagie Narsiah | University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa |
| Stijn Oosterlynck | KU Leuven, Belgium |
| Cynthia Pope | Central Connecticut State University and Yale University, USA |
| Laura Pulido | University of Southern California, USA |
| Nuria Benach Rovira | University of Barcelona, Spain |
| Abdi Samatar | University of Minnesota, USA |
| Erik Swyngedouw | University of Manchester, UK |
| Carly Thomsen | Middlebury College, USA |
| James Tyner | Kent State University, USA |
| Michael Watts | University of California, Berkeley, USA |
| Christian Zeller | University of Salzburg, Austria |
Manuscript Submission Guidelines: Human Geography
This Journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics
Please read the guidelines below then visit the Journal’s submission site https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hug to upload your manuscript. Please note that manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned. Remember you can log in to the submission site at any time to check on the progress of your paper through the peer review process.
Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of Human Geography will be reviewed.
If you have any questions about publishing with Sage, please visit the Sage Journal Solutions Portal
There are no fees payable to submit or publish in this Journal. Open Access options are available - see section 3.3 below.
As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere. Please see our guidelines on prior publication and note that Human Geography does not accept submissions of papers that have been posted on pre-print servers.
Table of Contents:
- What Do We Publish
1.1 Aims and Scope
1.2 Article Types
1.3 Writing Your Paper - Editorial Policies
2.1 Peer Review Policy
2.2 Authorship
2.3 Acknowledgements
2.4 Declaration of conflicting interests
2.5 Research Data
2.6 Research ethics and patient consent - Publishing Policies
3.1 Publication Ethics
3.2 Contributor’s Publishing Agreement
3.3 Open access and author archiving - Preparing Your Manuscript
4.1 Formatting
4.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics
4.3 Supplemental material
4.4 Reference style
4.5 English language editing services - Submitting Your Manuscript
5.1 ORCID
5.2 Information required for completing your submission
5.3 Permissions - On acceptance and publication
6.1 Sage Production
6.2 Online First Publication
6.3 Access to your published article
6.4 Promoting your article - Further Information
Before submitting your manuscript to Human Geography, please ensure you have read the Aims & Scope.
Human Geography is a peer-reviewed journal publishing contemporary research, debates, perspectives, and reviews pertaining to the human/environmental conditions from radical positions. The board of editors invites submission of substantive articles, contentions, reviews, and visual interventions. We strive for a well-written, critical, intellectually stimulating, socially relevant and interesting journal that can be read in its entirety. If authors are unsure about the fit of a proposed article, send us a brief synopsis to look at and give an opinion on suitability, style etc.
Substantive articles include original research -- empirical, theoretical and/or methodological—that advances the frontiers of radical scholarship in the broadest sense of the term. Findings submitted to Human Geography should not exceed 8000 words in length. The word limit excludes abstract, title page, keywords, acknowledgements and references. Abstracts should not exceed 250 words.
Contentions publishes shorter original contributions. Contentions can give a perspective on current or past events or intervene in topical debates. This section of the journal seeks to bridge the divide between academic and more journalistic writing. It seeks to apply critical thinking in human geography to real world situations with contemporary relevance for example those related to environmental issues, race, gender, sexuality, war and conflict, workers’ struggles, or other movements against injustice and oppression. Although contributions should be intellectually rigorous and may be informed by the author’s previous research, contentions are generally more focused on topical issues and can be more polemical in tone than a research article. Only a small number of references to the academic literature are needed. The maximum word count is 3,000 words excluding references and abstract. All submissions will be sent for anonymous peer review. For informal enquiries or for more information contact managing editors or contentions section editors.
Reviews are original, peer-reviewed surveys of current scholarship or scholar-activism in radical and critical human geography and social theory. They can address emerging themes, synthesize key findings, or propose new interventions within a disciplinary or interdisciplinary sub-field. They could also review trends in scholar-activist praxis, citing a more diverse range of source material (in addition to research literature). Articles should meet the quality of an expert research paper but need not include original empirical research. They are typically under 5000 words, excluding abstract, keywords, acknowledgements, and references. Please feel free to discuss preliminary ideas with the managing editors or reviews section editors.
Visual Interventions include original works of visual art, collages, visual essays, films, and critical experiments with other visual materials that can be published in print copies of Human Geography. The purpose of these projects is to explore and challenge established boundaries of activism, scholarship, and critical cultural production. The visual intervention must be accompanied by an original representative essay that highlights the intervention’s contribution to understanding space, place, time, motion, processes, activism, or events. Word-limit for the essay, excluding abstract, title, keywords, references, and labels for visuals is 1,500. Materials must be submitted as separate electronic files, properly labeled, formatted as high-quality images, 300 dpi, and sized in height and width dimensions approximate to how the author wishes these materials to appear in the journal. Number of images in an intervention is limited to 10. Images must comply with international copyright laws. For fair use guidelines see: https://library.gwu.edu/fair-use-analysis. Additional guidelines for submitting artwork are available at: https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guidelines. Peer-review involves evaluation of artistic as well as academic/scholar-activist contribution made by the visual(s) and the representative essay.
The Sage Author Gateway has some general advice and on how to get published, plus links to further resources. Sage Author Services also offers authors a variety of ways to improve and enhance their article including English language editing, plagiarism detection, and video abstract and infographic preparation.
1.3.1 Making your article discoverable
For information and guidance on how to make your article more discoverable, visit our Gateway page on How to Help Readers Find Your Article Online
2. Editorial Policies
2.1 Peer Review Policy
Substantive articles, contentions, reviews and visual interventions undergo double-anonymized peer-review process in which the author(s)’ names are withheld from the reviewers and vice versa. Substantive articles are normally reviewed by 3, and occasionally by 4 reviewers. Contentions, reviews, and visual interventions are reviewed by at least 2 reviewers.
Sage does not permit the use of author-suggested (recommended) reviewers at any stage of the submission process, be that through the web-based submission system or other communication.
Reviewers should be experts in their fields and should be able to provide an objective assessment of the manuscript. Our policy is that reviewers should not be assigned to a paper if:
- The reviewer is based at the same institution as any of the co-authors.
- The reviewer is based at the funding body of the paper.
- The author has recommended the reviewer.
- The reviewer has provided a personal (e.g. Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail) email account and an institutional email account cannot be found after performing a basic Google search (name, department and institution).
- Sage Track letters
Human Geography is committed to delivering high quality, fast peer-review for your paper, and as such has partnered with Publons. Publons is a third-party service that seeks to track, verify and give credit for peer review. Reviewers for Human Geography can opt in to Publons in order to claim their reviews or have them automatically verified and added to their reviewer profile. Reviewers claiming credit for their review will be associated with the relevant journal, but the article name, reviewer’s decision and the content of their review is not published on the site. For more information visit the Publons website.
The Editor or members of the Editorial Board may occasionally submit their own manuscripts for possible publication in the journal. In these cases, the peer review process will be managed by alternative members of the Board and the submitting Editor/Board member will have no involvement in the decision-making process.
2.2 Authorship
All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the article should be listed as authors. Principal authorship, authorship order, and other publication credits should be based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis.
Please note that AI chatbots, for example ChatGPT, should not be listed as authors. For more information see the policy on Use of ChatGPT and generative AI tools.
2.3 Acknowledgements
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, or a department chair who provided only general support.
2.3.1 Third party submissions
Where an individual who is not listed as an author submits a manuscript on behalf of the author(s), a statement must be included in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript and in the accompanying cover letter. The statements must:
- Disclose this type of editorial assistance – including the individual’s name, company and level of input
- Identify any entities that paid for this assistance
- Confirm that the listed authors have authorized the submission of their manuscript via third party and approved any statements or declarations, e.g. conflicting interests, funding, etc.
Where appropriate, Sage reserves the right to deny consideration to manuscripts submitted by a third party rather than by the authors themselves.
2.4 Declaration of conflicting interests
Human Geography encourages authors to include a declaration of any conflicting interests and recommends you review the good practice guidelines on the Sage Journal Author Gateway
2.5 Research Data
The journal is committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of research, and has the following research data sharing policy. For more information, including FAQs please visit the Sage Research Data policy pages.
Subject to appropriate ethical and legal considerations, authors are encouraged to:
- share your research data in a relevant public data repository
- include a data availability statement linking to your data. If it is not possible to share your data, we encourage you to consider using the statement to explain why it cannot be shared.
- cite this data in your research
2.6 Research ethics and patient consent
Medical research involving human subjects must be conducted according to the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki.
Submitted manuscripts should conform to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, and all papers reporting animal and/or human studies must state in the methods section that the relevant ethics committee or institutional review board provided (or waived) approval. Please ensure that you have provided the full name and institution of the review committee, in addition to the approval number.
For research articles, authors are also required to state in the methods section whether participants provided informed consent and whether the consent was written or verbal.
Information on informed consent to report individual cases or case series should be included in the manuscript text. A statement is required regarding whether written informed consent for patient information and images to be published was provided by the patient(s) or a legally authorized representative. Please do not submit the patient’s actual written informed consent with your article, as this in itself breaches the patient’s confidentiality. The Journal requests that you confirm to us, in writing, that you have obtained written informed consent but the written consent itself should be held by the authors/investigators themselves, for example in a patient’s hospital record. The confirmatory letter may be uploaded with your submission as a separate file.
Please also refer to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Protection of Research Participants.
All research involving animals submitted for publication must be approved by an ethics committee with oversight of the facility in which the studies were conducted. The journal has adopted the ARRIVE guidelines.
3. Publishing Policies
3.1 Publication Ethics
Sage is committed to upholding the integrity of the academic record. We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors and view the Publication Ethics page on the Sage Author Gateway
3.1.1 Plagiarism
Human Geography and Sage take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for example, is found to have plagiarized other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action
3.1.2 Prior publication
If material has been previously published it is not generally acceptable for publication in a Sage journal. However, there are certain circumstances where previously published material can be considered for publication. Please refer to the guidance on the Sage Author Gateway or if in doubt, contact the Editor at the address given below.
3.2 Contributor’s Publishing Agreement
Before publication, Sage requires the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. Sage’s Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement is an exclusive licence agreement which means that the author retains copyright in the work but grants Sage the sole and exclusive right and licence to publish for the full legal term of copyright. Exceptions may exist where an assignment of copyright is required or preferred by a proprietor other than Sage. In this case copyright in the work will be assigned from the author to the society. For more information please visit the Sage Author Gateway
3.3 Open access and author archiving
Human Geography offers optional open access publishing via the Sage Choice programme and Open Access agreements, where authors can publish open access either discounted or free of charge depending on the agreement with Sage. Find out if your institution is participating by visiting Open Access Agreements at Sage. For more information on Open Access publishing options at Sage please visit Sage Open Access. For information on funding body compliance, and depositing your article in repositories, please visit Sage’s Author Archiving and Re-Use Guidelines and Publishing Policies.
4. Preparing your manuscript
4.1 Formatting
The preferred format for your manuscript is Word. LaTeX files are also accepted. Word and (La)Tex templates are available on the Manuscript Submission Guidelines page of our Author Gateway.
4.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics
For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format, please visit Sage’s Manuscript Submission Guidelines
Figures supplied in colour will appear in colour online regardless of whether or not these illustrations are reproduced in colour in the printed version. For specifically requested colour reproduction in print, you will receive information regarding the costs from Sage after receipt of your accepted article.
4.3 Supplemental Material
This journal is able to host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc) alongside the full-text of the article. For more information please refer to our guidelines on submitting supplemental files
4.4 Reference Style
Human Geography adheres to the Sage Harvard reference style. View the Sage Harvard guidelines to ensure your manuscript conforms to this reference style.
Book
Clark JM and Hockey L (1979) Research for Nursing. Leeds: Dobson Publishers.
Book chapter
Gumley V (1988) Skin cancers. In: Tschudin V and Brown EB (eds) Nursing the Patient with Cancer. London: Hall House, pp.26–52.
Journal article
Huth EJ, King K and Lock S (1988) Uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals. British Medical Journal 296(4): 401–405.
If you use EndNote to manage references, you can download the Sage Harvard EndNote output file
4.5 English language editing services
Authors seeking assistance with English language editing, translation, or figure and manuscript formatting to fit the journal’s specifications should consider using Sage Language Services. Visit Sage Language Services on our Journal Author Gateway for further information.
Human Geography is hosted on Sage Track, a web based online submission and peer review system powered by ScholarOne™ Manuscripts. Visit https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hug to login and submit your article online.
IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in the system before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or authored for the journal in the past year it is likely that you will have had an account created. For further guidance on submitting your manuscript online please visit ScholarOne Online Help.
As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process Sage is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.
The collection of ORCID IDs from corresponding authors is now part of the submission process of this journal. If you already have an ORCID ID you will be asked to associate that to your submission during the online submission process. We also strongly encourage all co-authors to link their ORCID ID to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. It takes seconds to do: click the link when prompted, sign into your ORCID account and our systems are automatically updated. Your ORCID ID will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata, making your work attributable to you and only you. Your ORCID ID is published with your article so that fellow researchers reading your work can link to your ORCID profile and from there link to your other publications.
If you do not already have an ORCID ID please follow this link to create one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.
5.2 Information required for completing your submission
You will be asked to provide contact details and academic affiliations for all co-authors via the submission system and identify who is to be the corresponding author. These details must match what appears on your manuscript. The affiliation listed in the manuscript should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a manuscript note at the end of the paper. At this stage please ensure you have included all the required statements and declarations and uploaded any additional supplementary files (including reporting guidelines where relevant).
Please also ensure that you have obtained any necessary permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please see the Copyright and Permissions page on the Sage Author Gateway
6. On acceptance and publication
Your Sage Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will be made available to the corresponding author via our editing portal Sage Edit or by email, and corrections should be made directly or notified to us promptly. Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate.
Online First allows final articles (completed and approved articles awaiting assignment to a future issue) to be published online prior to their inclusion in a journal issue, which significantly reduces the lead time between submission and publication. Visit the Sage Journals help page for more details, including how to cite Online First articles.
6.3 Access to your published article
Sage provides authors with online access to their final article.
Publication is not the end of the process! You can help disseminate your paper and ensure it is as widely read and cited as possible. The Sage Author Gateway has numerous resources to help you promote your work. Visit the Promote Your Article page on the Gateway for tips and advice.
7. Further Information
Any correspondence, queries or additional requests for information on the manuscript submission process should be sent to the Human Geography editorial office as follows:
Waquar Ahmed – Waquar.Ahmed@unt.edu
Ipsita Chatterjee – Ipsita.Chatterjee@unt.edu
7.1 Appealing the publication decision
Editors have very broad discretion in determining whether an article is an appropriate fit for their journal. Many manuscripts are declined with a very general statement of the rejection decision. These decisions are not eligible for formal appeal unless the author believes the decision to reject the manuscript was based on an error in the review of the article, in which case the author may appeal the decision by providing the Editor with a detailed written description of the error they believe occurred.
If an author believes the decision regarding their manuscript was affected by a publication ethics breach, the author may contact the publisher with a detailed written description of their concern, and information supporting the concern, at publication_ethics@sagepub.com