Alexander is Assistant Professor in Cultural and Historical Geography in the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham. His research addresses performance cultures, experimental geographies and the urban politics of interwar Germany, contemporary landscape photography, the wider geographies of neo-liberal globalisation and alternative urbanisms, and the history of squatting. Alexander has a forthcoming book in the RGS-IBG book series titled Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin, and two others in the works, including a monograph on the popular history of urban squatting in Europe and North America, and a co-edited collection on the geographies of forced evictions.

Darshan is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam. He is also a Senior Researcher at the African Centre for Migration and Society, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Darshan’s research investigates how the state's claim to territory has been reconfigured in response to changing patterns of human mobility. He brings with him intellectual interests in international politics, the regulation and policing of migrants, and territoriality.  He is the author of Territory, Migration and the Evolution of the International System (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and co-editor of both Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage in Africa (Africa World Press, 2013) and Mobility Makes States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

I welcome Alexander and Darshan, and, with them on board, look forward to continuing to make the journal and its Open Site vibrant spaces for the publication of politically engaged and theoretically innovative work.