Editors’ Introduction

Issue 60.4 marks our one-year completion as editors of Southeastern Geographer. As this issue goes to press (early August), we continue to work remotely due to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused more than 675,000 deaths worldwide, and more than 160,000 deaths in the US (1Point3Acres 2020). The number of COVID-19 infections and deaths is still increasing rapidly, especially in the American South, with several states recording their highest number of COVID-19 cases in recent days.

We are at the fifth month since universities across the United States (and many other countries around the world) suddenly rushed to transition from face-to-face to a remote work environment. COVID-19 has impacted every facet of academia, especially in faculty research productivity—which we see has impacted our journal submission rate. Not only that faculty had to learn new technologies for teaching (which could be perhaps viewed as an opportunity), and the lack of access to library resources, but travel restrictions are probably the hardest hit for geographic research, especially for those geographers who rely heavily on field data. Likewise, many academics have been bearing a greater responsibility for family life (i.e., full-time caregiver to pre-school children, home schooling K-12 children, etc.…) while also being tremendously busy with modifying classes either online or hybrid models for the fall semester. At the same time, the stress level of geographers is high with the ongoing budget cuts, particularly given that in some places, geography programs are being scrutinized more closely due to the lack of understanding about the value of geographic education and research.

The lack of manuscript submissions, however, may not be uniform along gender lines—some early research in other disciplines suggests that submission rates from women faculty are lower than prior years (Flaherty 2020). With facets of gender inequality that exist in academia, including geography, women academics—particularly early-career, non-white, and households headed by single women may have been facing a greater burden and financial stress during COVID-19 (Cardel et al. 2020, Malisch et al. 2020). Research conducted jointly by Emory University and Harvard University found that while overall publication numbers in social sciences increased by 35 percent during the ten weeks of lockdown, research published by women academics dropped 13.9 percent (Cui et al. 2020). There is no doubt that in the coming days, geographers will be engaged (or may already be engaged) in understanding the extent and regional patterns of impacts on geographers in general, including their productivity by gender, race/ethnicity, household structure etc.…during the COVID-19 pandemic.

On a positive note, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to concern us, our parent organization, the American Association of Geographers (AAG) allocated nearly $1 million to support geographers, especially vulnerable geographers to address the systematic crisis that they are facing in the current climate. Similarly, we are happy to report that during the past five years (2016–2020) the number (46 percent) of publications by women as first authors in Southeastern Geographer is above the gender distributions of current (2018) female faculty (34.6 percent) and closely matches that of female graduate students (47.5 percent) in college and university geography departments (AAG 2020). We are hopeful that the gender gap in publications will continue to close in the coming days and that awareness of the relevancy of geographic work will continue to increase among decision makers and the public domain.

Since the foundation of the journal in 1961, the tradition of Southeastern Geographer has been to encourage submissions from geographers spanning the spectrum of career development from graduate students, early- through late-career faculty, and even retired faculty. Case in point: in this issue of four articles, graduate students (collaborative with faculty) served as first author for two papers, one paper was written by an assistant professor and one paper was authored by two retired faculty. The quality of these articles is also excellent, and as editors we marvel at the amount of good work that is submitted to the journal and the history of publications by former AAG...