Over the past few decades, many geographers and geography journals have challenged publication practices that contribute to the exclusion of marginalized scholars and intellectual traditions. While countless interventions have addressed such epistemic injustice along different stages and places of knowledge production, the mission to decentre, diversify, and provincialize the making of geographical knowledge is far from accomplished. For many years, Geographica Helvetica's (GH) editorial team has been committed to these efforts by providing a meeting point for diverse European geographical traditions and language communities, thereby using the journal's distinct possibilities and resources: we are a diamond open-access journal with a multilingual editorial team and a not-for-profit publisher, which allows for more flexibility as well as personal interaction. In this editorial, we sketch out an agenda committed to exploring and fostering situated yet global perspectives on the manifold connections, disconnections, and differences within Europe, as well as between Europe and other parts of the world and discuss how we seek to advance this agenda and some of the continuing practical hurdles we face.

Since its relaunch in 2012, the journal has built up a distinctive profile dedicated to breaking down barriers between European language communities (Korf et al., 2013). In their 2013 editorial, Korf et al. envisioned GH to be “an intellectual space of exchange and encounter for cosmopolitan European geographies to emerge” (p. 3). The journal's board at the time took Switzerland's multilingual tradition as an opportunity to “cross the borderland” of distinct European scientific communities and envisioned Switzerland as a hub from where “to fuse different ideas and traditions and to nurture linguistic specificities, semantic nuances, theoretical explorations and complex empirical connections” (Korf et al., 2013). To this end, the journal has pushed an agenda dedicated to provincializing knowledge while promoting conversations between a plurality of academic traditions: grounded in the acknowledgement of the partiality of perspectives and the situatedness of science yet committed to cross-cultural openings and pluriversal futures.

This agenda remains relevant to date, not least since its practical implementation has remained a challenge despite important advances. To be sure, GH has established itself as a space to debate the geographies and power relations of knowledge production in the discipline. Theme issues and a plethora of standalone articles have “embrac(ed) the provincialization of continental European geographies”, as Houssay-Holzschuch (2020) writes. While we are receiving more contributions from France-based scholars (but still fewer from our Italian colleagues), more remains to be done to establish GH as an outlet for a multilingual and cross-cultural dialogue beyond (and in conversation with) the Anglophone mainstream. This includes transcending the current predominance of German and English language contributions to the journal, and their focus on Swiss and German debates, and expanding our readership in and submissions from other countries.

We envision the regional focus of GH as a starting point to practise, discuss, and problematize the notion of European geographies. This could imply visualizing the diversity of knowledge geographies within Europe, and it could mean better understanding the notion of a regional geography labelled as European, including its border politics, modalities of whiteness, and colonial histories, amongst many themes we might come to understand as European. Thereby, we also seek to expand conversations further east (towards Eastern Europe and beyond) and invite contributions informed by and referencing debates and insights beyond German or Anglo-American scholarship. Moreover, GH is uniquely positioned to further advance a “global” European geography, i.e. a space from which to understand relationality with and difference to other parts of the world. This implies not only advancing dialogues that provincialize Europe by applying perspectives that link it to various “elsewheres”; it also means translating key ideas from other regional debates through literal translations and conceptual discussions. We have implemented new formats and launched several initiatives to advance this thematic, geographic, and epistemological agenda.

In the past three years, we have begun to commission contributions that advance GH's agenda through a new format, the forum. Fora permit the editorial board to commission diverse and creative contributions including translations, interviews, and lecture forums, which are rarely submitted to us without invitation. In “Black Mediterranean Geographies” – to provide one example – scholars writing with Italian, French, Greek, and German debates in mind discuss how to translate US-centred debates on Black geographies into European thinking. This forum expands on the GH lecture held by Camilla Hawthorne at GeoTag 2021.¹ Translating the original English text into German and Italian not only intends to further the text's readership but also to advance a nuanced conceptual vocabulary that pays tribute to different linguistic genealogies and academic traditions. This way, translation becomes a method of conceptual debate. Similarly, our book review formats have allowed us to present books written in one language to an audience reading in another.

The 2022 GH lecture on energy geographies and geopolitics held by Stefan Bouzarovski at the Swiss Geoscience Meeting (SGM) in Lausanne has allowed us to move another step in this direction. Stefan Bouzarovski's keynote on “Russia, Europe and the colonial present” was commented on by scholars with a combined area expertise in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia (Bouzarovski et al., 2023). Both fora expand the idea of Europe through a more global geography by sketching out a relational and perhaps less established imaginary of Europe that brings to light and reflects on intra-European diversity as well as Europe's relational positioning to the east and south.

In the next few years, we plan to launch calls for theme issues to advance topics that we consider particularly timely to discuss across linguistic borders, including the policing of academic speech at universities (forthcoming summer 2024) and the rise of European authoritarian politics (forthcoming autumn 2024). These calls include an explicit invitation to move beyond publishing theme issues from monolingual conference sessions and will be circulated in different linguistic and scientific communities. While we are especially keen to receive submissions and further exchange on these themes, we also continue to welcome the submissions of standalone articles, theme issue proposals, interventions, and book reviews that offer interesting insights into any field of geography.