Globalisation, academic capitalism, and the uneven geographies of international journal publishing spaces

Geographers have been arguing recently that the idea of what is 'international' in this field has been occupied by the hegemonic discourses of Anglo-American geography and journals. This paper takes this lively debate as an indicator of the global challenges facing higher education and research and provides an analysis of the changing conditions of knowledge production, characterised by internationalisation and competition. Knowledge production is governed to an increasing degree through practices based on market-like operations. The author argues that this may lead to the homogenisation of social science publication practices, which are known to be heterogeneous and context dependent. One indicator of this homogenisation is the demand for publishing in international journals that is arising in social sciences and humanities round the world. Both 'international' and 'quality' are increasingly being connected with the journals noted in the Institute of Scientific Information's (ISI) databases. Starting with an analysis of the changing conditions of knowledge production in general and in human geography in particular, the author scrutinises the spatial patterns of the international journal publishing spaces constituted by the ISI. The results show specific geographies: not only the manner in which the Anglo-American journals dominate the publishing space in science but also how the publishing spaces of the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities are very different. The publication space of social science journals is particularly limited to the English-speaking countries, and this is especially the case with human geography.