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Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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One of the world’s leading geography journals since 1911, AAG’s flagship publication publishes original, timely, and innovative articles that advance geographic knowledge in all facets of the discipline. Articles adhere to a high standard of scholarship and make an important contribution to geographic knowledge. They are grounded in the relevant literature of the specialization it represents and, where appropriate, establish relationships to themes within the broader discipline. Journal articles span across but are not limited to Geographic Methods; Human Geography; Nature and Society; and Physical Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences. Published 10 times a year, one special issue is dedicated to a single theme drawing on a diversity of papers from across the discipline.

Impact Factor: 3.2, ranking 21st out of 171 geography journals worldwide

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Manuscripts

Submission:
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through ScholarOne Manuscripts. For detailed instructions about article submission see:

Types:
The Annals publishes papers in four categories: Regular Manuscripts, Special Issues, Forums, and Commentaries. The journal also publishes the AAG Presidential Address and memorials for former AAG Presidents and distinguished geographers.
  • Regular Manuscripts—Articles submitted for publication should be original, timely, innovative, and advance knowledge in all facets of the discipline. They should address significant research problems and issues, and be attuned to the sensibilities of a diverse scholarly audience. Articles should be a maximum of 11,000 words, including abstract, references, notes, tables, and figure captions.
  • Special Issues—Special Issues are curated by Editors and include a collection of shorter manuscripts (around 5000 words) about a specific theme or issue. Topics rotate across the areas covered by the Annals; each year there is one Special Issue that highlights the work of geographers on a significant global theme. Abstracts of potential articles will be solicited via an open call. The articles are by invitation only, led by an Annals Editor, and based on the evaluation of the abstracts.
  • Forums—Forums are a collection of short papers on a focused topic that are published together in the journal. Forums are an opportunity to showcase and advance significant intellectual insights in the discipline in a coherent and collective way. Forums consist of an introduction (2,500 words) and short individual papers (5,000 words each), with a maximum total word limit of 25,000. A forum is proposed by a forum organizer, and if accepted, the forum organizer works in tandem with an Editor to guide the papers through the peer review process. Forum proposals should provide a background and context, table of contents, timeline, and justification of the forum’s significance and relevance to the Annals audience.
  • Commentaries—Commentaries are responses to specific published Annals articles and appear in online form only. They should be submitted within one year of the publication of the original article and written in a style and tone that is professional, scholarly and concise (less than 2,000 words including references). Commentaries will be peer reviewed. Authors of the original article will be invited to respond to the commentary in a short endorsement and/or rebuttal. To submit a commentary, please see the commentary submission guidelines linked above.

Call for Abstracts

The Annals of the American Association of Geographers is seeking contributions for a special issue on the topic of Social-Ecological Crises and Possibilities.

Reminiscent of key moments in the 1970s, crisis narratives have become dominant yet again in scholarly and popular culture. Anthropogenic climate change represents an existential threat to human-environment systems, and each year brings us closer to “tipping points” that threaten the viability for diverse forms of life on the planet. The COVID-19 pandemic and recent outbreaks of other emerging infectious diseases raise alarms for human populations. Reports on the rapid decline of global biodiversity and predictions for mass extinctions annually filter through mainstream media. Economic crises and risk have become routine events that have the potential to upend social networks and communities while reinforcing existing structural inequities. Even while crisis narratives have circulated for decades, their anticipated severity and magnitude, and potential compounding effects as polycrises has become a significant concern.

Regardless of these challenges, there is reason for optimism about possibilities for change. New forms of political organization and solidarity present themselves and techniques of experimentation assist in envisioning and creating future worlds. Shifting contours in academic scholarship that better support partnerships between groups to articulate solutions are emerging. This special issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers welcomes submissions that engage with the broad theme of crisis and possibility. The intention is twofold: first, to critically examine current human-environment dynamics that present existential challenges to social-ecological systems. Second, we seek to interrogate strategies for change that have the possibility of reshaping nature and society dynamics this century. Potential questions and topics of interest include:

  • What are the key challenges to human-environment systems in the twenty-first century?
  • What factors contribute in shaping these crises? Are these better understood as polycrises?
  • Who are the key institutions, groups, individuals, and organisms involved in shaping these crises?
  • What possibilities and limitations exist through the framing of crisis, and how do these possibilities and limitations vary by geography?
  • What are spaces of possibility and change that are present to respond to crises? What possibilities create space for more radical transformations?
  • How are social-ecological challenges uneven and how do frameworks of justice assist in understanding these challenges?
  • What are the implications of crisis for different generations and peoples?
  • Are there new systems, techniques of experimentation, and solutions worthy of consideration?
  • Which proposed ‘solutions’ to social-ecological change do we need to engage, critique, and/or reimagine?
  • What are the future scenarios and potential pathways for achieving sustainable social-ecological systems?
  • What frameworks or concepts help geographers reimagine the relationships between crisis and possibility?
  • What are the implications of these dynamics for the discipline of geography?
  • How can geographers play a leading role in responding to these challenges?

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be submitted by March 31, 2025 via this form. The Editor will consider all abstracts by June 2, 2025, and invite a selection to submit full papers for peer review.

Papers will have a target maximum length of 5,000 words (including main text, abstract, references, tables, figure captions, etc.). First drafts of papers will be due (via Manuscript Central) by December 1, 2025, and revised manuscripts will be due May 1, 2026, for publication in 2027. For any questions about this Special Issue contact the Editor Brian King. For questions about the abstract submission process contact the AAG Publications Director Jennifer Cassidento.

Editors, Editorial Board and Production Team

 

Ling Bian
Ling Bian
Geographic Methods

University at Buffalo

Ling Bian

Ling Bian

University at Buffalo

[email protected]

In addition to being an editor, Ling Bian is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo where she teaches geographic information systems and sciences, remote sensing, network analysis, and geostatistics. Her research interests are in the general area of geographic information science, but she has decades of publication experience in topics related to GIScience, remote sensing, and geographic image retrieval. In recent years she has focused on the ontological foundation of spatial representation, individual-based and spatially explicit behavior modeling, network analytics, and their implementations in the context of public health.

Bian currently serves on the editorial board of the Annals and has previously served on the editorial board of The Professional Geographer and as Associate Editor of ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Bian is the Director of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at Buffalo, which was formed in 1988, to promote excellence in GIScience research. Even though she is the methods editor, Bian believes that those wishing to publish their research in geography today should try to pay attention to more than the methods themselves. Scholars should look to tell a story with their research and strive to see the social relevance of their work.

Paul Adams
Paul Adams
Human Geography

University of Texas at Austin

Paul Adams

Paul Adams

University of Texas at Austin

[email protected]

Paul 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).

Brian King
Brian King
Nature and Society

The Pennsylvania State University

Brian King

Brian King

The Pennsylvania State University

[email protected]

Brian King is a professor and Head of the Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State. His research, teaching, and outreach focus on livelihoods, conservation and development, environmental change, and human health, centering on Southern Africa. More recently, his laboratory group (HELIX: Health and Environment Landscapes for Interdisciplinary eXchange) is examining how COVID-19 is transforming the US opioid epidemic. Beyond the university, his affiliations span numerous departments at Penn State and other institutions. At Penn State, he is 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 to Combat Substance Abuse. King is also 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.

King served on the Editorial Board of the Annals from 2016-2019, as well as on the Editorial Boards of African Geographical Review since 2019 and of Geoforum since 2014. His book States of Disease: Political Environments and Human Health (University of California Press, 2017) received the Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award, and was reviewed in April 2019 in The AAG Review of Books. An active member of several AAG Specialty Groups, including the Cultural and Political Ecology and Development Geographies specialty groups, he has also served in leadership roles, including successive terms as Director, Vice Chair, and Chair of the Developing Areas Specialty Group (which changed its name to Development Geographies in 2008).

King joins Human Geography editor Kendra Strauss of Simon Fraser University and Nature & Society Editor Katie Meehan of King’s College London to respond to the ongoing challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, including an increase in manuscript submissions and a decrease in reviewer availability. He will also support the editors’ ability to devote additional attention to upcoming special issues of the Annals. He will serve in the capacity of co-editor through December 31, 2023.

Rachel Franklin
Rachel Franklin
General Geography/Cross-Discipline

Newcastle University

Rachel Franklin

Rachel Franklin

Newcastle University

[email protected]

Rachel Franklin is a broadly trained human geographer with research expertise in population and spatial analysis. She is professor of Geographical Analysis at Newcastle University, where she researches spatial demography and spatial inequality. She is also keenly interested in pedagogy, especially the teaching of methods. In addition to her new duties at Annals, she edits the journal, Geographical Analysis. She is a visiting academic in Population Studies at Brown University and at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) in L’Aquila, Italy. She brings to her work at Annals extensive experience as a member of several journal editorial boards, including Population, Space and Place, the Annals, the Journal of Regional Science, and the Journal of Geographical Systems.

One of Franklin’s primary goals is to “work diligently to promote the Annals and maximize its visibility, both within and outside the discipline.” She is especially interested in highlighting the commonalities across sub-fields, finding common ground throughout the discipline.

Michaela Beunemann
Michaela Buenemann
Physical Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences

New Mexico State University

Michaela Beunemann

Michaela Buenemann

New Mexico State University

[email protected]

Michaela Buenemann is professor and head of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at New Mexico State University. Her interdisciplinary, international, and collaborative work features contributions in GIS, remote sensing, spatial modeling, landscape ecology, and biogeography. She has published in a wide range of geography, environmental sciences, and GIScience journals, and her research has been funded by numerous state and federal agencies. In the classroom and field, she teaches an array of courses in physical geography, socio-environmental systems, field methods, geographic information science and technology, and geographic theory and research design. She has contributed to the discipline of geography in various roles, including chair of the Southwest Division of the American Association of Geographers, Southwest Regional Councilor of the American Association of Geographers, and Southwest Regional Councilor of Gamma Theta Upsilon.

Buenemann brings to her editorship the experiences of seven years on the Editorial Board of the Physical Geography, Earth, and Environmental Sciences thematic area of the Annals. She is currently co-editing an Annals Special Issue on “National Parks and Protected Places” with David Butler and also serves as an Associate Editor for Regional Environmental Change. She earned her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Oklahoma in 2007.

Stephen Hanna
Stephen Hanna
Cartography Editor

University of Mary Washington

Stephen Hanna

Stephen Hanna

University of Mary Washington

[email protected]

Stephen Hanna is a full professor of geography and former chair of the Department of Geography at University of Mary Washington. His cartographic editorial experience is extensive, for example, Hanna has served as the cartography editor for two edited volumes on tourism, Mapping Tourism and Social Memory and Heritage Tourism Methodologies, as well as produced dozens of maps for personal publications in both academic and public outlets. As cartography editor, Hanna “enjoys engaging with a wide variety of graphics including some innovative ways of visualizing both qualitative and quantitative information.”

Hanna’s research is focused on critical cartography and heritage tourism, and his expertise is well documented in numerous cartographic projects. Some of his most recent NSF-funded team research involved investigating how slavery is (or is not) addressed in the landscapes, narratives, and performance that constitute southern plantation museums as heritage places.

In addition to ensuring that the maps and figures printed in the AAG suite of journals meet high quality cartographic standards, Hanna envisions his role as editor to include continued mentorship of students, a key component of his current work at an undergraduate focused institution.

Hanna offers the following advice for prospective publishers in geography: “As cartography editor, I’m focused on the maps people create to accompany their articles. Please don’t settle for the default map design options found in most GIS software packages. Take a little time to consider how best to encourage your readers to spend some time examining your maps. After all, you are including them to clearly communicate your findings or to support your argument.”

The Annals of the AAG has five editors, each of whom serve a four-year term. An Editorial board assists with editorial responsibilities, while staff from the AAG and Taylor & Francis manage various aspects of the production process.

 

Editorial Assistants

Aimee Trehey, University of Mary Washington
Brody Manquen, University of Texas at Austin
Yujia Pan, University at Buffalo

 

American Association of Geographers team

Jennifer Cassidento, Publications Director and Managing Editor

 

Taylor & Francis team

Katie Gezi, Portfolio Manager
Lea Cutler, Production Manager

 

Editorial Board

Janet Adomako, Bucknell University, USA

Clio Andris, Georgia Tech, USA

Faisal Anzah, Kuwait University, Kuwait

Jennifer Baka, Pennyslvania State University, USA

Mohana Basu, Kishore Bharati Bhagini Nivedita College, India

Jane Battersby, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Mike Batty, University College London, UK

Matthew Bekker, Brigham Young University, USA

Luke Bergmann, University of British Columbia, Canada

Elijah Bisung, Queen’s University, Canada

Carissa Brown, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Michaela Buenemann, New Mexico State University, USA

Alida Cantor, Portland State University, USA

Eric D. Carter, Macalester College, USA

Perry Carter, Texas Tech University, USA

Dawna Cerney, Youngstown State University, USA

Ipsita Chatterjee, University of North Texas, USA

Ashwini Chhatre, Indian School of Business, India

Bikramaditya K. Choudhary, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Arnab Roy Chowdhury, HSE University, Russia

Russell Congalton, University of New Hampshire, USA

Meghan Cope, University of Vermont, USA

Andrew Crooks, University at Buffalo, USA

Aparajita De, University of Delhi, India

Jason Dittmer, University College London, UK

Richard W. Dixon, Texas State University, USA

Suzana Dragicevic, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Sarah Elwood, University of Washington, USA

Kelsey Emard, Oregon State University, USA

Jessica Finlay, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Rachel Franklin, Newcastle University, UK

Christopher Gaffney, New York University, USA

Michael Goodchild, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Amy Griffin, RMIT University, Australia

Kevin Grove, Florida International University, USA

Tony Grubesic, University of California, Riverside, USA

Bartosz Grudzinski, Miami University, USA

Heidi Hauserman, University of Michigan, USA

Natalie Haussman, University of Pretoria, South Africa

Allison Hayes-Conroy, Temple University, USA

Marco Helbich, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Karen Paiva Henrique, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Guntram Herb, Middlebury College, USA

Nik Heynen, University of Georgia, USA

Ayodeji Iyanda, Prairie View A&M University, USA

André Jansson, Karlstad University, Sweden

Brian Jordan Jefferson, University of Illinois at Urbana, USA

Wendy Jepson, Texas A&M University, USA

Naya Jones, University of California Santa Cruz, USA

Kelly Kay, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Lawrence Kiage, Georgia State University, USA

Julie Michelle Klinger, University of Delaware, USA

Mei-Po Kwan, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, AO, Australian National University, Australia

Nina Lam, Louisiana State University, USA

Rebecca Lave, Indiana University, USA

Bin Li, Central Michigan University, USA

Yongmei Lu, Texas State University, USA

Ross H. Martin, Jacksonville State University, USA

James McCarthy, Clark University, USA

Erin McElroy, University of Washington, USA

Katie Meehan, King’s College London, UK

Kimberly Meitzen, Texas State University, USA

Cary J. Mock, University of South Carolina, USA

Imelda K. Moise, University of Miami, USA

Sharlene Mollett, University of Toronto, Canada

Todd W. Moore, Fort Hays State University, USA

Paul Isolo Mukwaya, Makerere University, Uganda

Daisuke Murakami, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japan

Larissa Naylor, University of Glasgow, UK

Benjamin Neimark, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Kathleen Nicoll, University of Utah, USA

Youjeong Oh, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia, Canada

Inaya Rakhmani, Universitas Indonesia, Australia

Colleen Reid, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Lynn M. Resler, Virginia Tech, USA

Andrea Rishworth, University of Toronto, Canada

Samuel Rufat, CY Cergy Paris University, France

Fausto O. Sarmiento, University of Georgia, USA

Carol F. Sawyer, University of South Alabama, USA

Nari Senanayake, University of Kentucky, USA

Patrick Shabram, Front Range Community College, USA

Shih-Lung Shaw, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

Mimi Sheller, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA

Zehao Shen, Peking University, China

Jamie Shinn, SUNY ESF, USA

Julie Silva, University at Buffalo, USA

Kendra Strauss, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Daniel Sui, Virginia Tech, USA

Juanita Sundberg, University of British Columbia, Canada

Jean-Claude Thill, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

Gabriela Valdivia, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

Bhanwar Vishvendra Raj Singh, Mohanlal Sukhadia University, India

Marissa Isaak Wald, Central New Mexico Community College, USA

Cherie Westbrook, University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Clayton J. Whitesides, Coastal Carolina University, USA

John Wilson, University of Southern California, USA

Levi John Wolf, University of Bristol, UK

Charlotte Wrigley-Asante, University of Ghana, Ghana

Yang Xu, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China

Sofia Zaragocin, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador

For general inquiries about this journal email [email protected].