Editor’s Note: A Call and a Commitment

The summer after my freshman year of college, I decided that I would become a geography major. Never mind the fact that I had not, as of yet, actually taken a college course in geography, nor did I do particularly well in my high school world geography course four years earlier. While I was not able to articulate it just yet, I decided to become a geographer not to study or travel to far off, exotic places. I became a geographer because I realized that it was the best way to understand the places that were closest to me, that were the most interconnected and intertwined with my own day-to-day life.

For most of my early career, that meant understanding my home state of Kentucky and its two largest cities where I spent my formative years. For a short time afterwards, it meant publishing some of the only scholarly investigations of Starkville, Mississippi, a college town of just 25,000 in rural Mississippi where I held my first faculty position. But since moving back to Atlanta to work at Georgia State four years ago, it has meant engaging with the city’s rich, but somehow still understudied, history and geography, including through the launch of my own publicly-oriented outlet for (quasi-) scholarly work: Mapping Atlanta.

But this focus on understanding the places closest to us did not just motivate my personal and professional life for the last two decades; it was also what motivated a core group of committed volunteers to create Atlanta Studies some years ago. As a scholarly journal and network alike, Atlanta Studies exists to better understand our city and metropolitan region and its place in the world. It exists to subject the city – and sometimes its leaders – to critique, examining not just what the issues of the day are, but how and why they came to be, and how they might have been (or still could be) different. It embodies the contradictory notion, expressed in the very first post on this journal’s website, that Atlanta is both “an easy city to hate… [and] also easy to love.” From being the first city in the United States to build public housing to being the first to demolish all of its public housing, from being the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement to being an innovator in the suppression of social movements, Atlanta truly does influence everything, whether for good or ill.

It is this ethos – a shared love of, fascination (and often frustration) with, our local context – that led me to jump at the opportunity to become the new executive editor of Atlanta Studies when I was approached with the idea last year. Unbeknownst to many, the journal’s editorial responsibilities began to be gradually handed over to me by the outgoing executive editor Ben Miller this past fall. Since that time, I have been working to get caught up to speed on the journal’s operations and procedures, the various pieces already in the publication pipeline, and all of the other ins-and-outs associated with managing this scrappy little online journal. That editorial transition is now complete, and with the passing of the new year, I have officially taken over as executive editor of Atlanta Studies.

The announcement of this transition has been delayed and delayed, largely because it took me awhile to find the time to write this statement. But these delays also worked to my advantage, allowing this piece to be published on an auspicious day: the 10th anniversary of Atlanta Studies’ launch. 

When this little experiment was launched ten years ago with a post on our sister journal Southern Spaces, editorial board member Ed Hatfield commented that “We want to bring academic scholarship to the public at large and to make a contribution to Atlanta’s media landscape, so people who are interested in history and politics can have a new source for commentary, analysis and information”. Through thirty full-length articles, ninety-some-odd blogposts, a dozen interviews, thirty books, film, podcast and exhibition reviews, and countless other assorted posts over the last decade, the journal has done just that. 

The rest of the city’s media landscape has grown and evolved in that time. Once trusted publications like Creative Loafing have gone by the wayside. The emergence of other local outlets like Canopy Atlanta and the Atlanta Community Press Collective have helped to fill some of that gap through new models of community and advocacy journalism. But Atlanta Studies remains the only scholarly publication focused solely on the city we all call home. And even though Atlanta Studies remains rooted in academic scholarship, it represents an effort to combat the all-too-often-unfulfilled commitment by academics to make our work fully accessible to the public, and to treat members of the non-credentialed public as scholars and knowledge creators in their own right.

And so, on this 10th anniversary of the journal’s launch, I want to make a call and a commitment: a call for more engagement with the local; a call for more of the deep, thoughtful analysis of the city’s past and present that Atlanta Studies has become known for; a call for more involvement in the journal, the annual symposium, the quarterly meetup events at Manuel’s Tavern, and any number of other events and initiatives that are still being dreamt up by the next generation of Atlanta scholars. 

At the same time, I want to make a commitment to ensuring that Atlanta Studies remains the institutional home for scholars, students and members of the public interested in the study of Atlanta; a commitment to publishing high-quality, original work that broadens and deepens our knowledge; a commitment to consistency, communication and timely publication; a commitment to lifting up the best of Atlanta-focused scholarship, but also to providing an outlet for the work of the city’s many organic intellectuals who may not have academic careers or even formal academic credentials, but still produce some of the most incisive analysis and commentary out there. 

As part of that commitment, alongside announcing this new era in the journal’s editorship, I am excited to announce a new era for the journal’s structure and appearance. Thanks to the work of Bailey Betik from Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship, Atlanta Studies has undergone a major facelift, as well as some adjustments to some of its internal organs. In an effort to better validate the amazing peer-reviewed work published in the journal, we have renamed the journal’s somewhat informal “blogposts” as the new “Notes” section of the journal. We believe this change better reflects the substance of these pieces and the substantive peer-review process they have undergone prior to publication. We are also excited to announce that our new Notes section will be welcoming submissions of Visual Notes, for those interested in sharing maps, photographs or other kinds of visualizations. All of that new structure and substance is wrapped in an amazing new design that we believe will make Atlanta Studies easier to navigate and more enjoyable to read, and we hope you will agree. 

So as we turn the (digital) page on the first ten years of Atlanta Studies, we hope that you will answer the call and commit to making the next ten years of Atlanta Studies even better.