I’m extremely happy with this article. It was a tough road but a valuable one. The seed was planted by the excellent Michele Lancione, who I was lucky enough to meet at a workshop in Neuchâtel in 2019. Michele introduced me to his approach to micropolitics and minor ethics, which he’d written about back in 2017. I’d missed that article, unfortunately, but was deeply moved and inspired by his talk and by our later conversations.

After our meeting, I returned to my regularly-scheduled work but still managed to keep that minor spark alive. Earlier this year, I returned to the minor to prepare a talk for Dislocating Urban Studies, where I was accepted into the Challenging Methods and Methodologies workshop. There, the wonderful Elena Trubina moderated our session, and helped me – as she always does – keep my thinking clear. I was enthusiastic after the session and felt that I had a solid argument to share.

So, nourished by Michele and Elena, I wrote my presentation in the form of a paper and submitted to a high-ranking journal that makes sense for this kind of intervention… and was promptly desk rejected.

It stung, of course, but in hindsight I understand that they were quite right. In that earlier form, the piece was baggy and shapeless – despite all the help I’d received. It simply didn’t have a strong enough argument overall.

With encouragement from colleagues and friends, I went back to the drawing board. I fashioned a proper argument, moulded the existing text into it, and sent it away to Geopolitics. The editor and reviewers were fantastic and I sincerely enjoyed the process. I had four reviewers – I guess more people said yes than they expected! Two of them gave extremely complementary reviews that didn’t require much work. Reviewers #1 and #4, by contrast, had some serious commentary. #1 in particular wasn’t convinced at all that the piece should go forward. #4 was more encouraging overall but highlighted several important ways in which I had lost the thread.

I’m not going to exaggerate: it was fun addressing their issues. Hard work, to be sure, but I stood my ground in ways that I thought were important – and explained why. In others, good lord, I am so grateful for their efforts flagging issues that I had completely overlooked. The paper is much refined because of their careful reviewing. You’ll note in the piece that I thank Michele, Elena, and the four reviewers for their help. It doesn’t feel right to let their contributions go unacknowledged.

And that’s really the purpose of being so transparent about the publication process here. I know I have a tiny audience here, but still: there’s a disproportionate number of PhD students and early career scholars among my modest readership. And I think it’s useful to render visible the whole process, warts and all, so that it might perhaps be easier when going through this process yourself.

Read it here, if you like. My 50 free e-prints are all gone already, unfortunately, and I can’t (yet) afford to make this open access. Someday, maybe, once I’m established. But drop me a line if you need a full text pre-print.