A coming community: young geographers coping with multi-tier spaces of academic publishing across Europe

Little is still known about the publishing practices of scholars based outside the leading Anglophone countries. More generally, little is known about the contemporary machineries of writing spaces within human geography and the other social sciences. In responding to a recent editorial by Ron Johnston, this paper seeks to start filling this void by providing the results of a research project investigating the multi-language publishing practices pursued by a selected sample of young European human geographers. The research findings throw light on multi-tier publishing spaces in European human geography today. The paper concludes by outlining a critique of the homo publicans emerging from rationalist accounts of academic publishing. In particular, by embracing a critical perspective informed by the attempt to build a `social geography of scientific knowledge production', the paper argues that publication strategies and practices do not only follow the direct paths of maximization of publication records, but can follow the more complex and differentiated paths of multi-level and heterarchical academic spaces and networks.