In this issue of our ‘5 Questions With’ series, Érudit interviewed the editorial Collective of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, a journal dedicated to the critical analysis of social, territorial and political issues.
This interview explores the journal’s collective approach, its long-standing commitment to open access and multilingualism, as well as its vision of mutual support, the dissemination of critical knowledge and the limitations of traditional research evaluation indicators.
1. You describe ACME’s editorial team as a collective. How does this manifest itself in the journal’s publishing and management activities? What do you reject about a more traditional structure?
ACME editors are members of the non-hierarchical ACME Collective. While we have key roles internal to the Collective, such as Editor(s) in Chief and a Coordinating Editor, our decision making operates horizontally. We have biannual Collective meetings where we work through and make decisions concerning key items, in addition to a LISTSERV that we use regularly to ask questions and make decisions outside of our meeting times. We strive for consensus-based decisions. We also have what we call ‘workflow teams’ which oversee key tasks of former Managing Editors (for the last two years, we didn’t have a managing editor and instead decided to work on collectively through the workflow teams). Our standing and ad hoc committees also step in when needed to oversee tasks such as communications, finance, language priorities, and upcoming conferences.
In addition to participating in key decision-making that directs the journal and the Collective, ACME editors also conduct editorial work on submissions assigned to them by a workflow team. Editorial work is determined according to experience, capacity, and expertise, with workloads openly assigned on an equitable basis. The equitable distribution of editorial assignments is directed by a model that recognizes the uneven demands placed upon those of us who are underrepresented in geography as a discipline and/or more junior in their career.
The Collective model embodies a rejection of the hierarchies that often dominate all aspects of our work and instead seek to enact an ethos of respect, care, generative critiques, and relationality. For instance, by openly discussing career expectations and personal capacity, we make our labour visible to one another and seek to value and respect where Collective members are at. We also often work alongside our authors who are more junior or whose knowledge has been subjugated from academia to ensure they are supported through the peer review process.
Our emphasis on horizontality, care, relationality, and support actively attempts to have our values align with our praxis, and especially within the academic institutions that often sidelines these values to instead prioritize productivity at the cost of integrity.
2. ACME has been disseminated on the web and in open access since 2002. Starting with volume 7, authors were published with the Creative Commons licence BY-NC-ND, and retain full rights to their work. Could you tell us more about these choices?
ACME has always been focussed on making critical and radical geographic scholarship freely available to all and do so in ways that reject the neoliberal policies of the university. As a journal, we have also always been online only. Our journal’s founders, Drs. Pamela Moss, Lawrence Berg, and Caroline Desbiens, spoke about the political economy of academic publishing in our very first issue in 2002. While much of what Moss, Burg & Desbiens (2002) wrote over 20 years ago remains true, pressures to corporatize academia and enumerate our productivity as scholars has unfortunately only increased since then. We see the impacts of these pressures as they degrade academic wellbeing with increasingly precarious working environments and unsustainable workloads.
Our move to a CC BY-NC-ND license reflects the intellectual property and labour of scholars whose rights to their work should not, we believe, be given to publishing corporations that then profit even more from our labour and may do so without making our research accessible to communities outside of the university. The complexity of the publishing for profit model has only increased with the shift to Article Processing Charges (APC) for open access options in many conventional peer reviewed journals; such a move further engrains inequalities in knowledge production across the globe with incredibly costly fees well beyond the means of most universities or scholars in the Global South.
Free open access without APC charges is therefore a commitment to supporting the active and equitable participation of marginalized scholars, editors and readers, particularly from the Global South and those in precarious positions, in the production and circulation of critical geographical knowledge.
3. Your website states: “We work to make radical scholarship accessible for free as a manifestation of our commitment to collective labour and mutual aid.”Can you expand on what this means for you?
As a journal of geography, we acknowledge the imperial and colonial roots of the discipline, and we seek to publish scholarship in solidarity with global and localized struggles. Many of us within the ACME Collective have been historically underrepresented in geography. We thus proceed on the principle that mutual aid and support are critical to challenging, dismantling, and transforming the injustices perpetuated through prevalent structures of power, many of which formed the very basis of geography as a discipline and continue to permeate the academy in which we work.
Because we aim to emphasize work by, about, and with Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and all people of colour and their struggles for self-determination, people from the Global South, 2SLGBTQIA+ people, women, gender diverse folx, migrants, refugees, and (dis)abled and differently-abled folks, more-than-human beings, and others, we also aim to embody this approach in our Collective structure.
In other words, we attempt to operate in a prefigurative way, where we embody the ethics and practice that we wish to see in the world in our publishing, editing, and engagement with one another.
All of ACME’s Collective members, with the exception of the Coordinating Editor who is usually a doctoral student, perform their tasks without financial compensation. Those who are generous enough to peer review for us and/or submit their work as authors are also not compensated; yet, their intellectual input, investment of labour, and support is key to ensuring we can maintain our diamond open access. The labour we all invest into the Collective is a reflection of our politics and contribution to the discipline, which we undertake through our regular workloads and demands of life.
We share this because since its inception, ACME has run almost exclusively on a modest budget provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Aid to Scholarly Journals Grant. Funds from the grant support the labour of our Coordinating Editor, whose work is truly invaluable to the journal! Recently, we have secured modest funds from UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences to launch our annual translation series. Since 2022, we have also been disseminated on Érudit, which has expanded our networks and knowledge of open access beyond geography. We share this financial information to make transparent the decisions that we have had to make along the way and as a Collective to ensure platinum open access.
This also means that those who choose to publish with us are also supporting ACME’s aim since tasks often paid for by publishing corporations, such as copyediting, are performed by authors—unfortunately, this is the current ‘price’ of ACME’s platinum open access.
4. Can you explain your position towards impact factor rankings and other metrics, and how this affects your approach to ensuring the visibility of the articles you publish?
The ACME Editorial Collective has been approached a number of times to be included in journal impact factor rankings. Each request for inclusion in these measures has been refused on political grounds. ACME opposes entering into a neoliberal system of audit that includes spurious impact factors and journal rankings. We also oppose the ways that these systems of measurement advance neoliberal competition, rewarding publication venues that are well resourced and systemically connected to hegemonic networks and institutions of knowledge production.
At the same time, the quantification of tenure files and academic job applications, as well as the corporatization of academic knowledge, requires that we support our authors. Therefore, any author seeking to know the total number of downloads may contact us at any time to receive this information, which is available to editors through the OJS platform. We will not, however, publish this information on our website because it entrenches already unequal power relations in knowledge production.
Additionally, library standards require proper organization and encoding of online papers, which then lends itself to indexing for online search engines. The manipulation of academic publishing by search engines–namely Google–requires that we be indexed and made searchable to Google Scholar (something that we recently agreed to do). If we continued to choose to not allow encoding of our papers online, search engines would only produce mentions of authors’ work as citations or posts to for-profit, academic, document-sharing sites.
As such, while we are frustrated by and begrudgingly agreeing to partake in the corporate manipulation of knowledge production through our indexing in these search engines, we also believe it imperative to disseminate ACME authors’ freely open access work to the broadest audiences possible as our ongoing commitment to challenging the status quo.
5. The journal publishes in several languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and German. How does multilingualism play into the journal’s critical geographic scholarship?
ACME’s three founding human geographers insisted that ACME be a multilingual journal from its inception (see Moss, Burg & Desbiens [2002]). ACME’s founding editors thus formed a Collective and International Advisory Board that was able to de-centre the Anglo-centric nature of geographic scholarship.
Critical geography, however, remains a very Anglocentric field (see, for instance, Amilhat Szary et al. 2025; Berg, Best, Gilmartin & Larsen 2022; Hammond et al. 2026; Hessek 2024). Few journals have the capacity to publish in multiple languages, but with ACME’s open access and Collective structure, we are able to publish according to the language skills and knowledges of our editors, authors, and reviewers. We continue to challenge the Anglo-centrism of critical geography through multilingual editing, including our newly expanded submission formats.
Our ‘Translations’ submission formats now allow for critical geographic works originally published in languages other than English to be published as translated for English readers; alternatively, we have received translations of work from English to Spanish, French, and Italian. Since we launched translations sections less than five years ago, we have had almost one standalone translation per issue. The goal of our Translation section is to create a platform for geographies/geographers from different locations and language contexts to share their work with broader audiences. Texts are also often preceded by a brief commentary, thus making visible critical interventions and states of the field from critical geographies beyond the Anglosphere, as well as the vital labour of translators.
In 2024, we also began our annual translation series. Our Languages Committee chooses one article per year that provides critical insight into critical geography outside of the Anglosphere and we then hire a graduate student to translate these works and write a corresponding commentary.
- For our 2024 translation (French to English), see Morange et al. 2024; for the adjoining commentary, see Hessek 2024.
- For our 2025 translation (English to Spanish) see Cahuas, Douglass-Jaimes, Faiver-Serna, González Mendoza, Martinez-Lugo, Ramírez, Peñaloza Morales 2026; for the adjoining commentary, see Peñaloza Morales 2026.
Bonus: Can you highlight some articles published in ACME that helped to further knowledge in critical geography?
There are so many fantastic articles that have been published in ACME! It was hard for us to select only a handful that we felt represented critical geographies. However, Collective members chimed in to share their most memorable and/or currently impactful critical geographic pieces:
“I would love to put forth Milan Bonté’s (2025) article on the concept of the trans closet. What I love about this piece is how rigorously it advances debates in queer and trans studies on visibility by grounding them in an empirical consideration of the actual cognitive maps offered generously by trans interview subjects”.
“The most recent ACME article I read was Harris 2023, which is an autoethnographic account of student debt from the point of view of a faculty member who was (is) also a student debtor. I assigned this article to my undergraduate class and the students said it was relatable with their experiences. It facilitated a fantastic discussion!”
“I would like to suggest the collective piece by Brickell et al 2024. This piece offers a rare, reflexive insight into the often-hidden practices of scholar-activism in legal geography, revealing the emotional, ethical, and practical dimensions of engaging with law as a critical researcher. By sharing candid reflections from geographers working across legal arenas, it opens an important conversation about the everyday realities of politically engaged scholarship”.
When discussing our most memorable pieces, ACME Collective members also considered how in its own distinctive way and following its own distinctive commitments, ACME has been central to critical geographies for decades. Many of ACME’s most engaged with articles are critical interventions around the values, practices, and politics of geographical knowledge production itself.
These include pieces that raised the profile and value of participatory approaches (Cahill, Sultana, and Pain 2007) and critical cartography and counter-mapping (Crampton and Krygier 2005, Dalton and Mason-Deese 2013), as well as critical pieces about the relationships between labour, time, and extractive logics in the university (Mountz et al. 2015).
Indeed, Mountz et al. 2015’s ‘For Slow Scholarship’ article is used by a Collective member in their Research Design graduate class to highlight that “how” we do scholarship shapes what we produce. Works such as these have reflected and shaped the field as it has changed over time.
Exciting pieces have also been released recently with ACME’s expansion to publish forms of writing and knowledge sharing that push the boundaries of convention and engage in critical scholarly communication in new and–we think!–urgent ways (e.g. Cahuas and Muñoz 2024, Gergen et al. 2024). For instance, a highly accessed piece published in our most recent issue is currently a punk song written in English and Polish (Szwabowski and Zańko 2026).
Eager to learn more about scholarly publishing?
Read the other interviews of the ” 5 questions with…” series.