When we began this issue, back in November, half our editorial team were in London and students marched in the streets.
That’s how we were going to open this letter: the student protesters at the University of London and their magnificent book placards. We are four humanities graduates who have watched our past and present departments change radically over the past few years. And the future does not look bright; so we were going to consider the question of universities more generally, the value of the humanities and the difficulty of pay. We were going to look at Stefan Collini and JM Coetzee, the recent history of the university and the legacy of Mandela. We were going to ask you to consider the very definition of education: who defines it, who refines it, who receives it and where. Factors, of course, interfered.
And then none of us were present this month when the latest round of students protests hit the Royal Opera House.
We come to our second issue still uncertain what to write to you, dear reader, in this letter; what to offer you after a new year which has hit hard and left us, personally and professionally, bobbing in its wake.
This issue takes up two well-worn strands of questioning in the attempt to place co-ordinates: where things are located, and why we think of them the way we do. As Tim Cresswell wrote in 1996, ‘value and meaning are not inherent in any space or place – indeed they must be created, reproduced and defended from heresy’. Cresswell is speaking of geography; but the same holds true of psychic space. We will speak on the very definition of education eventually, perhaps, with a defence.
This issue looks at space in all of its guises. We have cities and nations alongside archives and cognitive science. We give you writers from in and outside the academy, discussing art and politics; we offer you poetry, theatre and critical theory. We begin, tentatively, to chart a course.
If our last issue was at a precipice this one is at crossroads. There is less humour in this one but, perhaps, more heart. We send it to you from across the globe.
Thank you,
The Editors