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In March 2020, as COVID-19 spread and the globe locked down, we announced a I Society and Space i (S&S) editorial decision to "press pause" on our normal working practices ([2]). What the COVID-19 pandemic has done is expose even further the endoskeleton of the world." Back then, and indeed until the pandemic began, we generally had to send out six to eight invitations to get three reports, and reviewers occasionally reneged on their commitments or, more frequently, were a few weeks or so late due to unforeseen circumstances. [Extracted from the article]

The article talks about the role and vision of the perodical such as fostering social theory, increasing social and intellectual ferment, and social sciences and humanities.

Neil Brenner, Christian Schmid and others aim to rejuvenate radical approaches to urbanization with their notion of 'planetary urbanization'. But while there is much to commend in this framework, it has met with strong critique from other radical urban studies scholars. In this commentary, I discuss the fact that although I initially set out to write an essay that would put queer urban studies into conversation with this new approach, I instead chose to stay on the outside of planetary urbanization along with many other scholars whose work is informed by queer, feminist, and critical race theoretical approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A list is presented of the new editorial team of the periodical "Society and Space", and details of the revised aims and scope of the project.

In the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, efforts to shake off an authoritarian image and foster a creative economy have led to significant changes in sexual citizenship since the early 2000s. Most remarked upon has been the government’s new liberalized approach to public expressions of homosexuality while it simultaneously upholds legislation and policies that discriminate against gays and lesbians. Critical scholarly and activist responses to this state of affairs abound, with many pressing for the ‘freedom to love’ for sexual minorities. In this article, I extend this emergent queer critique by arguing for the need to move laterally away from a single-issue, sexual identity-based project in order to launch other lines of critique and highlight additional avenues for political struggle. I situate this ostensible contest between heterosexuality and homosexuality as just one facet of a much larger story about the ways in which heteronormativity works through teleological narratives of progress and social reproduction in Singapore. Specifically, I highlight the family’s function as a regulative governing fiction in the city-state, setting out the ways in which the ‘proper family’ has been carefully cultivated throughout Singapore’s colonial and postcolonial history to produce both a stable population of ‘quality’ citizens as well as multiple ‘queered’ others who fall outside the very particular heterosexual family norm upon which Singapore’s developmental aims have come to rest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singapore's rise as a 'global city' has attracted much scholarly attention, especially as its government has recently turned to 'creative city' strategies. In line with critiques made of other global and creative cities around the world, important critiques have been leveled that the city-state's developmental efforts are bureaucratic, hierarchical, narrowly economistic, and, most importantly, socially polarizing. This paper demonstrates that Singapore's global/creative city project is also heteronormative and, further, that this heteronormative logic is tied in fundamental ways to broad forms of social polarization. The drive to attract 'foreign talent' to the city-state as a key prong in attaining future economic growth has resulted in significant changes in sexual citizenship over the last decade. Efforts to shake off an authoritarian image and foster a creative economy have led to the liberalization of the government's approach to public expressions of homosexuality. Yet discriminatory legislation and policy that excludes gays and lesbians from full citizenship has been maintained. Further, Singapore maintains a bifurcated migration regime that invites 'foreign talent' and their families to become part of the national family through naturalization, while 'foreign workers' have no route to future citizenship and are prohibited from bringing dependents with them, as well as from marrying and/or having children locally. Through a coercive politics of constrained im/mobility, this alien surplus labour force is set on an alternative developmental path that precludes intimacy, love, and familial connection. Building on recent work on the notion of 'queer time', this paper calls attention to the ways in which the city-state's developmental aims are underpinned by an exclusionary notion of reproductive futurity, and argues that a queer theoretical approach adds much to critical efforts to undermine the Singapore government's illiberal politics of pragmatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the editorial policy of the journal title "Society and Space" including the use of qualitative method to article length, the addition of new members in teh editorial board, and not sending all paper for a review.

During a 2007 reform of Singapore's Penal Code, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong rejected calls by gay and lesbian activists for the removal of a colonial-era statute that prohibits 'gross indecency' between two men. This paper critically responds to the perpetuation of this illiberal sexual politics by exploring heteronormativity in the city-state as a colonial trace. It takes a postcolonial queer approach that combines insights from work on the globalization of sexuality, histories of colonialism, and postcolonial development geographies to interrogate the sedimentation of hetero- normativity in Singapore over its late-colonial and early-postcolonial periods. Emphasis is placed on the role of colonized elites in transforming an entrepot of single male migrant workers into a nation of nuclear families. By attending to the contingent materialities of colonial governance through an examination of the intimate politics advanced by local colonial actors, the legacy of heteronorma- tivity in Singapore is revealed to be about much more than heterosexuality and homosexuality. As such, it is argued that an approach that goes beyond sexuality per se to disrupt the progress narrative on which heteronormativity in Singapore relies might therefore be a useful way to challenge the narrow imagination of intimate possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one on an essay "An intimate and imperial feminism," by Stephen Legg, one on "Ties that bind," by Deirdre Conlon, and another on "The queer intimacy of global vision," by Meredith Raimondo.

Scholarship on queer geographies has called attention to the active production of space as heterosexualized and has levelled powerful critiques at the implicit heterosexual bias of much geographical theorizing. As a result, critical geographers have begun to remark upon the resistance of gays, lesbians and other sexual subjects to a dominant heterosexuality. But such a liberal framework of oppression and resistance is precisely the sort of mapping that poststructuralist queer theory emerged to write against. So, rather than charting the progress of queer geographies, this article offers a critical reading of the deployment of the notion of 'queer space' in geography and highlights an alternative queer approach that is inseparable from feminist, materialist, postcolonial and critical race theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer geographers have been surprisingly slow to engage with the global turn that has existed for some time in queer studies outside the discipline. This is beginning to change but the range of sites addressed is limited largely to Euro-American ones. This paper considers the ways in which queer geographers might contribute to already-existing debates over the relationship between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’ in global queer studies. The paper departs from Larry Knopp and Michael Brown's ‘Queer diffusions’, a paper that appeared in a special issue of Society and Space (2003, 21 461-477). Though they limit themselves to the national scale of the United States, their argument that we should destigmatize places and identities cast as ‘backward’ has obvious relevance at the global scale. Its consistencies and inconsistencies with various strands of argument within the global queer-studies literature reveal that geographers might also learn from the spatial nuance developed in these debates. Specifically, this literature review concludes that we must also destigmatize those places and identities that are cast as ‘forward’ if queer globalization is to truly be decentered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the plight of the Roma people within Europe, the conflicting aims of foreign aid and antiterrorist financial controls in Pakistan, and the translation of the book "Hegel ou Spinoza," by Pierre Macherey.