Encountering Folk, Knowledge, and Place

Introduction

Studies of culture, history, literature, and art can provide insight into our multiple senses of place. The manner in which we speak, write, illustrate, and produce our landscapes; the politics of land use; and life on land or sea (or away from it) reflect human efforts to live locally. Similarly, studies of ecologies, landforms, weather, and other natural phenomena can teach us about how people spatialise and make homes in the world. Culture, lifeworlds, and place can be mutually constitutive, and knowledge is situated.

In short, knowing takes place. People are shaped by their relationships with the places in which they live or have lived. One’s sense of place is expressed in many different dimensions of human life: emotions, biographies, imagination, stories, and personal experiences. The myriad ways in which people interact with place, or the environment, have long been a subject of inquiry among geographers, folklorists, and others across the social sciences and humanities. Knowing and knowledge systems are developed collectively through relations between peoples and places. When people travel, they take places with them, and the changing physical attributes of place can challenge locally developed knowledges. Yet it is precisely our situation in place that makes it so difficult to avoid parochialism and narrow thinking—and that makes it so necessary to grapple with the complexities of relations between people and place.

In this paper, we (the authors of this paper and co-editors-in-chief of Folk, Knowledge, Place) first introduce ourselves, then show how our collective work has demonstrated to us the need for this journal. We then discuss theoretical frameworks before introducing our approach to researching in-between between disciplines, places, and theories. We follow this by presenting how the journal is published and finally end with a brief conclusion.

Who we are and how we got here

It is mid-afternoon, and we (Yaso and Adam) are sitting in the empty all-day restaurant at the Wyndham Grand Bangsar hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Yaso has travelled from her hometown Ipoh in the north, and Adam has flown in from Guangzhou, meeting here to catch up, but mainly to finish writing this inaugural editorial for Folk, Knowledge, Place.

On the way in from the airport late last night, Adam’s ride hailing driver had pointed at the hotel and said, “That’s where you’re going. But how do we get there?”

The hotel sits inside the bend of a highway interchange, bounded by roads: elevated, ground-level, subterranean. It is complicated enough by car, but if one is on foot, there is no obvious means of arrival or departure. The hotel is ostensibly what Marc Augé (2020) would call ‘non-place’: empty of memory and relation.

But this is not how we see it. When we came to this place, we brought along our own memories and relations, and they will settle here, for us, as they have for others in the past. When we come to places, we find ways of making meaning out of them, and with them, even in places that seem to resist such personalisation and enculturation. As Keith H. Basso (1996) writes, all too often, scholars’ “only concern with place is the flat material reality of the arrangement of things” (p. xiv), whereas place is in fact “a cultural activity…a commonplace occurrence, an ordinary way of engaging one’s surroundings and finding them significant” (Basso, 1996, p. 143).

But who are we, to have come to this hotel, to write this editorial?

Yaso: The conundrum of ancestry, place, and personhood

The poetics of place start for me in early Tamil caṅkam literature, which writes into history a people, their knowledge, and their land in ancient Tamil Nadu. This is where I am from. But I am also from Malaysia, where I was born of Tamil/Sri Lankan origin. Since the 1990s, I have primarily spent my time living and working in Melbourne, Australia, on East Kulin lands.

I open my co-editorial contribution with an acknowledgement of country, as is offered at most formal and public gatherings in Australia. We are on the lands and unceded sovereignty of the traditional custodians, the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung mobs of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past, current, and emerging. I acknowledge the continued struggle of Indigenous peoples. I call upon the wisdom of all Indigenous and traditional custodians, ancestors, and elders, past and present, of the lands, waters, forests, skies, and animals to guide us in our deliberations, both here on East Kulin lands and wherever this editorial might be read.

Living as I do between countries, on land that belongs or has belonged to Others, and on the land of my ancestors, I have come to realise that where we stand is a ritual of humility with respect to ancestry, knowledge, and place. This reminder of where we come from tells us not only what we know but also what we do not know and have not experienced, perhaps cannot know and cannot experience. It limits our claims to knowing.

When someone states their positionality, it implies a recognition that they are bringing their entire relationality—ancestry, family, places of origin—into a piece of writing or encounter. As I coauthor this essay, I am reminded of my own Tamil history of place, one that I was forced to encounter as I returned to my place of ancestry, a place ridden with battle scars and profound losses from war, genocide, and atrocity. The nature of personhood in Tamil culture (Daniel, 1984) is never isolated or individuated, but always understood in context; in the character/disposition (kunam) of one’s village (ur), home (vidu), land, or community and ultimately with the cosmos (kadavul) itself.

In 2010, I stood on my ancestral land in Sri Lanka. The nation was struggling to rebuild from the tsunami of 2004 as well as from three decades of horrific civil war (Nadarajah, 2016; Nadarajah & Mulligan, 2011). I was inevitably drawn back to the narratives of my mother and her father. The colonial administration had made my grandfather leave Jaffna and come to Malaysia. This administration, as my mother often told me, ordered practically every facet of the lives of the colonised. Until she drew her last breath on 2^nd July 2024, my mother held onto her belief (she was a voracious reader and oral historian) that, from a historical perspective, Sri Lanka’s and Malaysia’s current problems stem largely from a failure to dismantle their inherited European colonial system of governance and education.

I understood then, in Sri Lanka, this poignant pull of land, people, and knowledge that holds us to our preexisting relationalities and lifeworlds. The atrocities of Sri Lanka’s long-drawn civil war can never be forgotten, and we continue to be implicated by it in so many ways. These implications are sometimes conscious through our writings, but are often unconscious, in the ways we inscribe ourselves back into our colonised epistemologies and training. And yet we also feel a pull to a deeper space, within us or outside us, that has meaning beyond colonised lands and their histories.

As I move between my ancestral lands of Sri Lanka, my citizenry of Malaysia, and my permanent residency in Australia, I think often and now increasingly more deeply about both the richness and the complexities of the nuances, fluidity, and contexts of terms such as al (person), idam (place), and broadly the associations of personhood with the more nonhuman contexts of place, land, and ur (country). It is a process that has its own uncertainties, as well as its critical moments of research as “premises of memory, metaphors, and colonial debris” (Nadarajah, 2021, p. 170).

Adam: In movement, but possibly not an immigrant

All my life, people have asked me, “Where do you come from?”

As a child in Miami, I would say, “Miami. But I have my mother’s New Jersey accent.”

In Denmark, where I lived from the age of 20, I would say, “Miami.” It was OK to skip the New Jersey bit: In Denmark, most people just perceived an American accent, a notion that would have been inconceivable back in Miami.

Then, inevitably, the follow-up question: “Why would you leave Miami and come to Denmark?” The people who asked this did not necessarily think Miami was better than Denmark, but I supposed they were thinking: Sunshine, palm trees, beach. My own thoughts, from my childhood, were different: Suburbs, strip malls, traffic congestion. I imagined a different Miami than they did.

But also, something else. I reflected on what I thought people thought I ought to feel when they asked where I came from. Should I feel a sense of homeland? I never thought of Miami as my homeland. I had no ancestry in Miami. My parents’ families had travelled to the USA from an Eastern Europe obscured by conscious efforts at forgetting. Whatever traumas had driven them across the Atlantic would remain locked away in the places from which they had left. Miami was just where I lived—as a settler colonist, though neither I nor anyone else I knew ever saw it that way at the time.

Across two decades of experience, family building, learning, work, and friendship spent in different parts of the country, I came to perceive Denmark as home. In the Danish language, non-ethnic Danes are often referred to as indvandrer (literally, ‘one who walks in’), sharing a similar etymology with the Latin-derived ‘immigrant’. This Danish term ‘indvandrer’, with its potential to embody a range of meanings surrounding who belongs in a place and who does not, makes me feel uncomfortable, even as a voice in my head says, “Well, of course, you are an immigrant.”

My move to Guangzhou, China in 2022 gave me opportunities to learn about different perceptions of belonging in place. It was another step in a history of movement that has encouraged me to intellectualise my experiences, in this case with respect to terminological differences across places, cultures, and times.

Putonghua, the standardised Chinese spoken language, lacks a generic term that covers the range of meanings of the English-language ‘immigrant’ (Xu, 2022). During my time in Guangzhou and visits elsewhere in China, strangers often refer to me as waiguoren 外国人 (literally, foreign person), laowai 老外 (old foreign), or meiguoren 美国人 (American). ‘Waiguoren’ and ‘laowai’ are frequently translated as ‘foreigner’, but in popular usage, the meaning tends to be ‘not-Chinese’ (Liu & Self, 2020). In contrast, in Chinese legal usage, ‘waiguoren’ refers to someone who lives in a different place than their country of nationality (Xu, 2022). Listing the potential Chinese-language nouns for ‘immigrant’ does not give the full picture though. When people who know me refer to my immigrant status, it is often as a verbal phrase expressing my movement across space, perhaps as someone who chuguo 出国 (leaves the country) or who qu 去 (goes to) somewhere for some purpose.

My experiences in China and with Chinese-language terms have taught me a new range of associations between person, home, movement, and belonging, sometimes involving shifts between arrival and departure, between immigrant-as-noun and immigrant-as-verb. For the first time in decades, I do not feel that ‘immigrant’ is part of my identity. I feel instead that migration is something I do.

My own history and sense of rootlessness do not, however, set my knowing outside place; my knowing is still a product of multiply situated, encultured experience.

Interrogating the scholar within through writing and working together

This section is an attempt at sharing our (Yaso’s and Adam’s) own methodological efforts to turn the ‘decolonial gaze’ (Moosavi, 2023) toward ourselves and “interrogate our own positionality or scholarship in relation to coloniality” (p. 128). This writing together and collaborating through a critical reflexive lens has also meant working through the tension between individual and collective ways of knowing, struggling to resist ingrained binary mappings of race, gender, sexuality, and place onto our writings and work—these legacies of colonialism that continue to reinscribe Western-centrism while claiming to decolonise.

Epeli Hauʻofa (1994) laments how, early on in his academic career, he was complicit in reproducing colonial ideas, remaking the same colonial geography of the Pacific. Through our conversations and work together, we too began to challenge and contest the way colonialism has seeped and settled into the most intimate ways in which we conceived, wrote, and thought about ourselves. Amid growing calls for academic decolonisation, we know emphatically that the ethical and political context for knowledge production remains ever more fragile and contested. This makes methodological (decolonial) critical reflexivity a crucial undertaking for interrogating the structures that reproduce coloniality within academia and publishing.

We first met in 2015 at a conference Adam organised on ‘Indigenous development’ in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), an Indigenous Inuit-majority territory. At the time, Adam was living in Denmark and working as a private sector academic. Having completed a PhD in folklore and ethnology focused on Northern European folk belief, he had transitioned to researching island culture, politics, and economy from a geographical perspective (Grydehøj, 2013, 2015, 2016a, 2016b). Yaso was then a senior research fellow at RMIT University, Australia. Her work focused on interrogating how the local and the global constitute and contest the complex terrain of place, coloniality, agency, and knowledges (James et al., 2012; Nadarajah, 2011, 2016; Nadarajah & Mulligan, 2011).

Our disparate academic, professional, cultural, and political positions inspired us to engage in stimulating and sometimes difficult conversations. As we began coauthoring together, we quickly found ourselves confronted by the colonial complicities in our writing, publications, and professional identities. In our first coauthored paper, ‘Island studies as a decolonial project’, we advanced the notion that coloniality is at the centre of the multidisciplinary field of island studies and that “the task of decolonisation remains unfinished and is perhaps unfinishable” (Nadarajah & Grydehøj, 2016, p. 440). Macarena Gómez-Barris and May Joseph (2019) would later identify this paper as a watershed in island studies, in which we “lay the groundwork for the ontological and epistemological study of ocean impact on human and nonhuman worldings…Nadarajah and Grydehøj argue for the spheres of island living as sites of the decolonial processes” (p. 3).

We continued this attempt to open up a framework of interwoven and interrelational knowledges and methodologies in another paper, coauthored with Inuk scholar Ulunnguaq Markussen, on ‘Islands of indigeneity’, which posited that island spatiality affects perceptions of indigeneity (Grydehøj et al., 2020). We were, however, increasingly unsettled by the ease with which theory could overcome experience in academic writing and how political geography, economics, and development studies scholarship were often content to overlook Indigenous ways of imagining lifeways that had persisted for millennia and instead seek to reinforce dominant European understandings of sustainability, geography, and place.

Over the next years, we brought together other colleagues to think, research, and write with us. Among these was Ping Su, a Chinese scholar with a background in Caribbean literature studies. Our radically collaborative method came to the fore in the article ‘Practicing decolonial political geography’, which asked how colonised island societies respond to rhetoric directed at them by powerful states (Grydehøj et al., 2021). The paper was methodologically challenging precisely because its research question concerned epistemic diversity and place-based difference and thus required numerous and diverse authorial perspectives. The research and writing process, which is described in the paper itself, was long and iterative, involving many stages of individual writing followed by group sharing and editing. The eight coauthors provided both topical and area specialties with respect to Australia, China, Guåhan, Japan, Kalaallit Nunaat, Okinawa, and the USA. The research left us frustrated by our difficulty in avoiding binary thinking: Our efforts to co-produce a conversation among non-hegemonic perspectives could not escape colonial framings. These methodological complications became a secondary focus of the paper and informed our subsequent call for critical reflexivity, pluralistic approaches to inclusivity, and recognition of epistemic difference when working with islands, which we coauthored together with Ping Su and the Netherlands-based anthropologist Elena Burgos Martinez (Nadarajah, Burgos Martinez, et al., 2022). Also inspired by this joint work, Adam and Ping Su coauthored a book calling for a place-sensitive relational perspective on world politics (Grydehøj & Su, 2021), and Yaso carried out projects on the use of study tours as a collaborative learning method (Nadarajah, 2023; Nadarajah, Mejía, et al., 2022).

Over the past few years, after Adam moved to Guangzhou, we have continued our close collaboration and mutual intellectual deepening. In late 2022, we decided to create a new journal that could embody our scholarly ambitions, and we launched Folk, Knowledge, Place in 2024.

Negotiating theoretical frameworks

Folk, Knowledge, Place concerns how people (folk), culture (knowledge), and geography (place) interact with one another. As such, it grapples with fundamental questions about humanity and its existence in the world.

None of these concepts are absolute. They are all products in different ways of scholarly norms and conventions that have formed through complex sociospatial processes and are embedded in difficult power relations.

Folk, Knowledge, Place has its editorial office in Guangzhou, and its founding editors and advisory board members are based at institutions around the world. Yet all of us, regardless of our backgrounds, are working in systems and environments that have been moulded by a globalised academia largely rooted in Western epistemologies (Moosavi, 2023). By ‘Western epistemologies’, we mean the knowledge traditions that began developing in 14^th-Century European Modernity and then spread as part of the colonial endeavour. Western science and scholarship contributed to the successful propagation of European Modernity as universal truth, as an exclusionary standard. This produced the ‘colonial difference’, a “global racial/ethnic hierarchy of Europeans and non-Europeans” that became integral to “the development of the capitalist world-system’s international division of labor” (Grosfoguel, 2002, p. 206; see also Escobar, 2020). In the words of Walter Mignolo (1999) “Failure to perceive the colonial difference”—that today’s social, economic, and political system enforces particular power relations—“is at the same time failure to perceive the coloniality of being” (p. 244).

Criticism has been directed at use of ‘West’ and ‘Western’, alongside their implied opposites ‘non-West’ and ‘non-Western’. This is indeed an artificial dichotomy; there is nothing natural or inevitable about coloniality. Like ‘North’/‘South’ and ‘developed’/‘developing’, the division between West and non-West has been conceived and perpetuated by humans and has been pursued in ways that naturalise the colonial difference and entrench positions of dominance (Grydehøj et al., 2024).

As Sharifah Munirah Alatas (2022, p. 121) writes, the West/non-West binary “refers to the ideological and intellectual orientation dichotomy of perspectives, rather than an exclusive geographic positioning” (p. 121). West and non-West are not monolithic entities. There is no homogenous group of people and places that can be called the non-West, and there is no specific “realisable and authentic non-western subject” (Vieira, 2019, p. 154) that can be retrieved. By the same token, the non-West is not singularly victimised by and innocent in processes of oppression, and it is not something that exists separate to the West. As far as scholarship is concerned, because of the pervasiveness of Western epistemic dominance, “No one from the academy, even if they are members of non-white communities, is automatically exempt from perpetuating privileged, Western-centric, colonial ideas” (Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021, p. 6). The West and non-West are not people or places at all but are categories created within European Modernity that have had lasting impacts on all peoples. To point this out is not to say this binary ought to exist (see also Murrey & Jackson, 2020). Nor is it to say that the creation of the colonial non-West has destroyed the possibility for subjectivities beside—and not merely in opposition to—the West (Penehira et al., 2014, p. 98), though it is to say that these subjectivities cannot turn back the clock to a precolonial era.

It is nevertheless sometimes argued that critical moves in scholarship reinforce colonialism and entrench faulty binaries, that speaking about the colonial difference makes it real. We argue that although the colonial difference is regrettable, it is real, and failure to put the colonial difference into words allows those who benefit from it and are not adversely affected by it to simply ignore that it exists.

The argument that we ought to put painful pasts behind us and simply move forward in unity rests upon a “defense of universal history and universal form” and “a set of claims about conceptual coherence, usually in contrast to narratives that are seen to be fragmentary, particularistic and idiosyncratic” (Roy, 2016, p. 8)—all in a manner that conveniently happens to be identical with notions that arose out of European Modernity. Elena Ruíz (2020) refers to this as a process of ‘cultural gaslighting’, in which the scholarly mainstream pathologises and introduces doubt into critical thought: It is “epistemic territorial expansion that empowers members of dominant communities to claim epistemic space as their own, and only their own” (p. 703). When the West is positioned as standard, systemically marginalised individuals are made responsible for demonstrating that their ideas can fit within or be comprehended by this standard (Ruíz, 2020, p. 699). “Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises,” writes Audre Lorde (1998, p. 875), “those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them.” This process constructs an illusory postraciality and purported ‘colour blindness’: If the West can consign colonialism and racism to the past, then it is possible to accuse those who allege racism of themselves being racists (Murrey & Jackson, 2020, p. 919). Grada Kilomba (2012, p. 301) remarks that, within the “white space” of academia:

The structures of knowledge validation, which define what ‘true’ and ‘valid’ scholarship is, are controlled by white scholars, both male and female, who declare their perspectives universal requirements….Any scholarship that does not convey the Eurocentric order of knowledge has been continuously rejected on the grounds that it does not constitute credible science. (Kilomba, 2012, p. 301)

Attempts to claim epistemic difference are liable to be labelled as ethnonationalist and ignorant of (Western) history, as betraying the promise of a world after colonialism (Grydehøj & Su, 2021; Hansen, 2022).

The demand for those advancing ideas outside the Western episteme to prove their legitimacy on Western terms makes acceptance conditional upon self-erasure. The inability of one person to conceive of a thing does not negate this thing’s existence, yet peoples who have been alienated by European Modernity end up being translated back to themselves in fragmentary form, following the breaking up of land, language, discourse, personhood (Nadarajah, 2021; Villadsen, 2021). The “settler moves to innocence” criticised by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) are damaging not only because they allow self-reflective posturing to stand in for remedial action but also because they suggest that the act of listening to someone else’s story is sufficient. As Kilomba (2012) argues, because dominant scholarship is inadequate “to relate not only to marginalised subjects, but also to our experiences and discourses,” it performs “a fruitful combination of power, intimidation and control which succeeds in silencing oppressed voices” (p. 303).

In our experiences as coauthors and journal editors, we have witnessed disciplining moves by scholars (of all genders and skin colours) working out of positions and institutions of power who have sought to enforce specific critical priorities. A debate or rhetoric that is crucial within one country or society may not seem equally relevant to critical scholars in another. Even radical critiques are, after all, epistemically situated in culture, place, and experience, and unless special care is taken, they may produce new universalisms or context-specific caveats to epistemic hegemony (Abu-Lughod, 2002, pp. 27–28; Padia, 2022; Sofia Zaragocin in Grosfoguel, 2011; Naylor et al., 2018, p. 203). As Shirley Anne Tate and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2022, p. 7) note, even the concept of ‘intersectionality’, intended to take a broad and encompassing view of social domination, “is not a universal framework” and reflects a particular epistemology and ideology. The hegemonic status of intersectionality discourse in certain academic and activist circles indicates the risk of it obscuring or co-opting particular and contingent forms of domination (Mojab & Carpenter, 2019).

The enforcement of critical but Western scholarly norms is also evident in discussions of a global ‘rise of the Right’ or resurgence of populist politics: Not only do these frequently universalise Eurocentric left-right ideological divides, but they also perceive the world as a reflection of current political conflicts within the West itself. To see Asian, African, or South American politicians through the lens of Donald Trump is to not see Asian, African, or South American politicians at all. Questionable Western metaphors are pervasive in studies of the non-West (Alatas, 2022).

The unilateral creation of allyship may furthermore weaken the ability of scholars in the non-West to productively intervene in their own political and social environments without risking being labelled as facilitators of foreign influence. Related to this are efforts by scholars in the West to push scholars in the non-West to ‘choose sides’ and undertake public interventions in non-Western discussions on Western terms—sometimes forcing individuals in the non-West to decide between scholarly blacklisting at home or abroad. In this sense, the specific topic of contention matters less than the question of whether Western expectations for critical contributions should be universally enforced.

As a direct consequence of our commitment to respecting the places, cultures, and sources of knowledge, we refuse the suggestion that scholars ought to “think in a specific mode” (Bakshi, 2020, p. 539). Central to the philosophy of Folk, Knowledge, Place is the concept of pluriversality, defined by Madina Tlostanova (2020) as “maintaining a coexistence and correlation of many different interacting and intersecting positions with equal rights to existence” (p. 19). In other words, in contrast to the fundamentalist “premise that there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality” (Grosfoguel, 2011, p. 3), we hold that there are limitless legitimate ways of experiencing, perceiving, knowing, expressing, and creating the world. “We all speak from a specific time and place, from a specific reality and history” (Kilomba, 2012, p. 304). Yet these positions defy easy ascription and description. “Epistemology implies and is embedded in a politics of location” (Mignolo, 1999, p. 236).

Folk, Knowledge, Place will not enforce exclusionary approaches to criticality and will not discipline scholarship on the basis of universal standards. The journal is not apolitical (research is inevitably political), but it does not take specific political stances at the editorial level, and it will publish pieces from all perspectives, as long as they are reasonable, fair, and do not encourage hatred and violence (see also Grydehøj, 2018). The journal also does not discriminate against authors on the basis of ethnicity, citizenship, nationality, or institutional affiliation and does not support blacklisting or bans on this basis.

In-between places

Folk, Knowledge, Place’s central concepts (‘folk’, ‘knowledge’, ‘place’) are expansive paradigms that are wrapped up in globalised Western academia but also have significance beyond it.

Instead of saying that the journal grapples with fundamental questions about humanity and its existence in the world, it is more appropriate to say that it grapples with fundamental questions about how different peoples exist in and in-between different worlds. Fundamentalism and universalism are alluring, providing the illusion of answers the are applicable to every question. Denial of universality requires acceptance of partiality. It is important to acknowledge that our own positions within relational networks affect our limited understandings of the world (Zhu & Grydehøj, 2023). As Yaqing Qin (2018, p. ix) suggests when advocating for the culturally specific positioning of research, such partiality is not only inevitable but also productive and creative:

Every social scientist is an observer from within society and can only see one side of it at one time. The whole picture perhaps exists, but no one human can see it as it is. A different angle is significant, for it provides people with a different image they cannot see from other angels. A new image implies creation.

Cultures provide different angles for observation and different perspectives for understanding and interpretation. Culture is the shared background knowledge of a community of practice.

Folk, Knowledge, Place embraces this sense of creation and serves as a space for thinking, knowledge production, and communication across difference. It is vital for different peoples and positionings to speak with one another. It is certainly insufficient for Indigenous, feminist, colonised, queer, racialised, or other marginalised perspectives to be accepted but siloed within a globalised academia that seeks standardisation. This journal seeks to engage with the vast richness of differences and experiences, creating potentials for new geographic linkages. It foregrounds historic, old, partial, neglected, ostensibly peripheral, or even just inconvenient knowledges that are otherwise overlooked or erased in moves toward globalised development (and overdevelopment) as well as globalised understanding (and selective ignorance). The journal also understands elite and dominant positions as fostering cultural traditions of their own. These too are deserving of study from situated perspectives, instead of from the stance of what Santiago Castro-Gómez (2021) terms ‘the zero-point hubris’ of the universal knower.

The journal’s editorial office in Guangzhou is meaningful. There is a tendency for Western scholarship to have a global, general influence while scholarship from outside the West is regarded as being of local, regional, or specialist interest (Grydehøj et al., 2023; Nadarajah, Burgos Martinez, et al., 2022). Specialised, regionally focused periodicals in folklore studies and human geography show the potential for creating and communicating knowledge by and for those outside the West, but because they are regional in scope, it remains largely the case that scholars in the West are invited to speak to the world, while scholars outside the West are expected to speak among themselves. In the words of Robbie Shilliam (2015), there is a division between “the knowers and the known, that is, those groups who are racialized as competent to produce adequate and generalizable knowledge of the contemporary world and those who are racialized as incompetent to do so” (p. 375).

Folk, Knowledge, Place is a global journal in the sense that it publishes papers from and about peoples and places around the globe. But it is not a globalised journal. It encourages and invites multiple subjectivities, ways of knowing the world, and ways of expressing this knowledge. By putting culture and place in context and foregrounding diverse epistemologies, the journal asks what its central concepts, constituent disciplines, and frameworks might mean from Indigenous, tribal, Asian, Pacific, African, South American, and other perspectives. It also, by extension, asks how European cultural perspectives, once properly positioned and situated, can unfold in their richness and vibrancy, without the impossible burden of presenting universal, objective truths. Folk, Knowledge, Place embraces pluriversality and considers what it means to move critically and reflexively between different epistemes, ontologies, lifeworlds, and places.

Place creates perspective, and perspective creates place. Nostalgic, oversimplified, culturally homogenous conceptions of place are built in opposition to the disruption and displacement that characterises Modernity (Massey, 1994), encouraging a romantic linking of people and place that does justice to the complexity of neither (Kongas Maranda, 1963). Timothy Cochrane (1987) notes that “folklorists commonly describe the results of a longstanding relationship between people and a place without pursuing how these results are achieved” (p. 1), while the geological materialities of cultural production are often overlooked (Bennett, 2023; Bennett & Dodds, 2024). Nuanced and incisive understandings are necessary.

The extractions and intrusions of coloniality have fragmented space for everyone (Yusoff, 2018), yet place does not have to be idealised and essentialised in order to be perceived, and to be perceived as vital in the formation of culture and knowing. Literature, both oral and written, can perform place creation, just as it can narrate a people across time and space (Haring, 2003; McLaren & Zhang, 2017), serving as a ‘cultural script’ (Mathur, 2008). Vengal Muthukumar (2011) captures this deep interrelationality between folk, knowledge, and place in his discussion of Tamil caṅkam literature:

Even a cursory reading of the caṅkam texts reveals that the protagonists in the poems experience place in the most direct and immediate way—by being in that place. … The experience of place in these poems emerges in a dialogic between the human self and place—a dialogic which brings together sensory experience, perception, memory, and various socio-cultural patterns. In these poems, place is not as much an objective geographical entity, as it is the process of perception itself. (Muthukumar, 2011, p. 2)

In this sense of place as perception, the prelapsarian ideal place was always an illusion. Recognition of the dialogue between people and place, with culture at the centre, guards against easy romanticisms and the phantasmic desire for a future in which we can all just pretend that the past never happened. The past did happen; the past continues to happen; and honest readings of history, both within the West and outside it, require an acceptance that every people and place is located in-between past, present, and future.

Histories of colonialism and epistemic dominance have robbed people of identity, place, and ways of knowing and being. Pluriversalism is necessary not to hide from painful pasts but to present new futures and new ways of perceiving and creating tradition. In the title of our journal, ‘knowledge’ is a noun, but much of what interests us is that awkward verb, ‘knowing’: the ways in which people actively maintain folk and place by continually rethinking and rediscovering them. Through stories, art, poetry, food, festivals, dance, labour, advertising, religion, and much else, people reinscribe themselves into place and place into themselves (Del Giudice, 2010; Inserra, 2017; Magliocco, 2010; Qu & Zollet, 2023; Schram, 2009).

Human-place relations are not settled realities but are constantly shifting, even as our cultural narratives so often strive for fixity and security (Aboubakr, 2017; Foster, 2012; Hirsch, 2015). Spatialised histories can be selected as heritage to reinforce claims to place and arguments concerning how place ought to affect culture (Grydehøj, 2010). As Brenda Yeoh and Lily Kong (Yeoh & Kong, 1996) write concerning the cultivation of heritage in Singapore, reclaiming “rightful place and time is perceived to provide a cultural bulwark against the pressures of modernisation and westernisation” (p. 54), and this consolidated sense of inheritance can subsequently be deployed for political purposes by diverse actors. In their research concerning Bangalore, Hemangini Gupta and Kaveri Medappa (2020) speak of ‘affective landscapes’, “the embodied, sensorial, and more-than-human fields of action through which residents…navigate their existence in multiple temporalities” (p. 1698). Heritage’s spatiotemporal expansionism demonstrates how, far from being consigned to the past, history can be continually nurtured and propagated across space and into the future (Chatterjee, 2024; Dang, 2021; Hong, 2020; Ronström, 2008, 2024). Yet as Hidefumi Nishiyama (2022a, 2024) suggests, the counterparts to such politics of memory are the ‘politics of ignorance’ and ‘politics of forgetting’, through which space and time are emptied in the interests of a dominating power.

These processes are also present in the desire to territorially confine indigeneity even though such bordering work often runs counter to Indigenous constructions of space (Curley & Smith, 2020; Daigle, 2016; Grydehøj & Ou, 2017; Nishiyama, 2022b; Somiah, 2022). Mapping itself can be productive of oppression (Garuba, 2002; Junaid, 2020; Rose-Redwood et al., 2020). As David Welchman Gegeo (2001) writes, space does not straightforwardly determine indigeneity: “Indigenous encompasses the place from which we see the world, interact with it, and interpret social reality” (p. 493).

The impulse to oversimplify and neglect details is sometimes true for research itself. Andrew Curley and Sara Smith (2024) critique universalising theoretical frameworks such as the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plantationocene, arguing that “Cenes bound time and space while generating linear narratives about the past and present. They impose abstract and singular timescales on diverse places, overwriting variegated experiences and temporalities” (p. 170). Craig Santos Perez (2021) similarly decries how scholarly climate change narratives produce “reductionist caricatures of Pacific islanders, thus foreclosing our complex and diverse experiences, cultures, and subjectivities” (p. 3). Climate coloniality involves not just the imposition of climate change impacts from the West onto the non-West but also the epistemic violence arising from the “whitewashing of climate discourses and intellectual spaces” (Sultana, 2022, p. 8) to render them less threatening to Western power. Theory can seek to tame ‘knowing’ into ‘knowledge’, thereby restricting localised, Indigenous, marginalised, or inconvenient agencies within a scope that can be encompassed and managed by globalised academia. There is growing awareness of the complex hierarchies within which scholarly theories, institutions, and methods exist (e.g., Bhambra et al., 2018; Maldonado-Torres et al., 2018; Mamdani, 2018; Nimführ, 2022; Otero & Martínez-Rivera, 2024; Pulido, 2018; Roberts, 2021) as well as efforts to narrate and perform history and place in new and liberatory ways (e.g., Noxolo, 2024; Prahlad, 2021; Schneider, 2020; Shilliam, 2015; Swan, 2022).

It is into this space—between disciplines, between places, between theories—that Folk, Knowledge, Place steps. We have not founded the journal in order to expound upon a particular theory but instead in order to express, explore, and experiment with the in-betweenness of research and knowledgemaking in the pluriverse. The journal attempts to challenge universal orthodoxies and unsettle fixed narratives, grappling with and being upfront about the dual tendency for researchers to construct their fields and for fields to challenge and more meaningfully locate their researchers (Nadarajah, 2007).

Publishing

Folk, Knowledge, Place is open to approaches and expressive modes that cannot always find a home in other publications that are for various reasons more trapped within globalised scholarly norms that serve some people better than others.

These are issues we grappled with in our previous work as editors of Island Studies Journal (ISJ). In a cross-tabulation analysis of articles published in ISJ, we found that coloniality and the West/non-West divide remain prevalent, with differences in the kinds of research that scholars from different regions can have published and the kinds of impact their articles can make (Grydehøj et al., 2023). We concluded:

Even in a radically open journal like ISJ, globalized academic publishing systematically disadvantages already marginalized scholars. Yet as long as this system persists, intersectionally marginalized scholars are dependent upon their involvement in these same exclusionary processes. It is symptomatic of coloniality more generally that the burden of changing the system for the better is disproportionately placed on those who the system harms. (Grydehøj et al., 2023, p. 12)

Folk, Knowledge, Place arrives into this same publishing landscape. However, as a new journal, it has been possible for us to construct Folk, Knowledge, Place upon distinct disciplinary, intellectual, and technical foundations that better address these challenges.

The Hong Kong-based Beewolf Press publishes Folk, Knowledge, Place on a diamond open access basis, meaning that there are no fees for authors or readers. Diamond open access publishing in highly ranked or prestigious journals is of special value to authors who are marginalised within or disadvantaged by the academic system. This is because open access articles acquire more readers, while prestigious journals assist more in career assessments, thereby removing barriers to professional access and advancement (Grydehøj et al., 2023).

This kind of publishing comes, however, with additional costs and responsibilities. Authors and readers tend not to be aware of the full range of bureaucratic, administrative, academic, and other processes involved in transforming a submitted manuscript into an article in a published journal issue, much less the costs in money and labour that are incurred (Grydehøj & Su, 2023). Folk, Knowledge, Place receives financial support from South China University of Technology’s School of Foreign Languages and its Research Center for Indian Ocean Island Countries, which also serve as the journal’s institutional home. This funding is used to pay for the journal’s editorial management system, publishing platform, production costs, and language editing. All these services are paid for and performed on a professional basis in order to avoid labour exploitation, which remains rife in academic publishing and is especially targeted at students and early career researchers.

Because Folk, Knowledge, Place is a fully online journal that is innovatively positioned between disciplines in the humanities (folklore studies) and social sciences (human geography), it has enhanced ability to test the limits of the academic publishing genre even while maintaining many of the conventions of traditional publishing. When we write that the journal is located at the intersection of folklore studies and human geography, we mean that the journal publishes work that bridges the gaps between and draws upon the diverse strengths of these and related disciplines. Folk, Knowledge, Place welcomes insights from all disciplines, in keeping with its collaborative and transdisciplinary approach. This creates openings for (re)framing, (re)imagining, and (re)connecting with field methodologies of people, place, and knowing; disrupting the epistemic sites of hierarchized power and knowledge relations; and mapping the multiple ways in which place is conceived, embodied, lived, and practiced. The journal furthermore offers space for creative approaches to conception, method, and presentation, with the only requirement along these lines being that it is possible for papers to undergo peer review.

While Folk, Knowledge, Place will experiment with the possibilities opened up by fully digital academic publishing, including innovations in genre and multimedia presentation, we remain committed to academic rigour. We believe that, for all its flaws, double-blind peer review remains the best guarantor of research quality, novelty, and value. As editors, we are committed to actively mitigating the very real problems that double-blind peer review presents in terms of bias linked to (perceived) race, gender, prestige, personality, and other factors, while also noting that alternative methods of assessing article submissions (open peer review, single-blind peer review, editorial review, etc.) do not necessarily escape these problems either. We underline that journal editors must make hard choices for the sake of themselves, their journals, their readers, and their authors (Grydehøj & Su, 2023).

Conclusion

This inaugural editorial introduction, like Folk, Knowledge, Place itself, is just a beginning. Folk, Knowledge, Place is a journal that does not have ‘the answer’; it is a journal for collectively working toward answers. This journal will serve as a platform and resource for new ways of performing scholarship and doing research in the pluriverse.

Over time and across space, as we learn more—together—about ourselves and about our worlds, the journal will inevitably evolve and transform, move in directions that we cannot predict at present. We hope you will join us on this intellectual, crosscultural, and transdisciplinary journey.

Funding

This work was supported by the Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science under Grant No. GD24LN11 and the National Social Science Fund of China under Grant No. 21&ZD274 and 23&ZD304.