Prize‐winning paper for 2025, SJTG sponsored lectures, forums and tribute

Since 2013, the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG) has awarded prizes for the best paper by a graduate student and for the best overall paper published in the journal. All past prize winners are recorded on the SJTG's homepage, available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/14679493/homepage/best_paper_prize.htm. However, in 2025, Wiley (who publishes the SJTG through an agreement with the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore) imposed a new system for submission and handling of papers. The prior system enabled authors to declare if they were graduate students at the time of paper submissions. This is no longer available, thus precluding a prize for the graduate student category in 2025. There is therefore only one overall best paper prize winner for 2025, from a shortlist of three papers that are tabulated below. Shortlisting and final selection were undertaken collectively by the editorial team. Congratulations to the authors of all the shortlisted papers, and especially to the author of the prize-winning contribution. Details are in the table below: Landscapes of state capitalism: Reconciling the vernacular, national development imaginaries, and green capital accumulation Andrew Stokols ‘Seasons of the Anthropocene’: politicization of the haze season in Southeast Asia Helena Varkkey, Felicia Liu, Thomas Smith, Sophie Trott Changing oceans and maritime transport: research on new routes and geographical convenience in the Arctic region İrşad Bayırhan, Cem Gazioğlu, Selçuk Nas The best overall paper, by Andrew Stokols (2025), interrogates the category of state-capitalism, bringing it into conversation with the production of landscape and examining how natural spaces, production sites and other zones intersect and are mobilized within symbolic national imaginaries. Instead of focusing on the institutional form of state-capitalism and its resultant economic development, he argues that state-owned land developers create synergies between green capital accumulation and national economic imperatives by integrating natural and culturally symbolic landscapes into new development zones. This creates distinctive ‘state capitalist landscapes’ as emblems of national ideologies as evidenced in Singapore's Jurong Innovation District, Wangchan Valley in Thailand and China's Xiong’an New Area. Aligned with Singapore's ‘City in a Garden’ vision, China's ‘ecological civilization’ and Thailand's quest for a ‘sufficiency economy’, such landscapes are testaments to the materializing power of eco-ideals and political imaginaries. Since 1953 the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (and antecedents) has been a leading international forum for scholarship on tropical environments, localities and their connections. The SJTG publishes theoretical and empirical articles and reviews that deal with the physical and human environments of the tropics, and development issues from geographical as well as interrelated disciplinary viewpoints that advance research on tropical natures, places or interconnections. It is such interest in ‘interconnections’ that enables a paper on ‘Changing oceans and maritime transport: research on new routes and geographical convenience in the Arctic region’ to find a home in the SJTG. The paper charts scenarios for how global climate change, particularly the feasibility for a northern sea route, have the potential to reconfigure maritime shipping economies and geographies, including routes between Singapore and Europe. Shifting planetary atmospheric and oceanic circulations is a theme periodically flagged in prior editorials (Sidaway et al., 2020). The implications for trade route optimisation, determination of distances between Asian and European port-cities and the opening of Arctic navigation opportunities truly underscore the interconnections that our journal charts. The other shortlisted paper by Varkkey et al. (2025), traces the emergence of a public discourse of ‘haze season’ in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. They examine the political frames and consequences of different ways in which haze – related to burning/clearing of land for cultivation (and which frequently has a transboundary character) – is being narrated. The interrelated concepts of ‘patronage politics’ and ‘violent atmospheres’ highlight the politicised ways in which the haze and haze season are communicated (or not) in news media and official and corporate documents. Three narratives or ‘storylines’ on the haze were identified and depending on their agendas, different political, economic and community actors draw upon different narratives to meet their partisan goals. The science, wider impacts and politics of climate change were also featured in 11 previously published articles (including the one by Varkkey et al., 2025) comprising a virtual special issue (VSI) of the SJTG on ‘Reimagining climate change responses—insights from the Tropics’ published in May 2025. As noted in an Editorial introduction, ‘The tropics, characterized by their unparalleled biodiversity, and complex socio-ecological systems, serve as both a ‘frontline’ and a ‘laboratory’ in contests over climate change’ (Lupascu, 2025: 175). This virtual special issue also highlights how tropical physical environments, ranging from monsoonal river basins to low-lying deltas and coastal wetlands, are undergoing rapid geomorphological and ecological change under climate stress. This set follows a prior virtual special issue on ‘Post-colonial and Post-Tropical Geographies’ of 11 other previously published papers (see Sidaway et al., 2018). We are pleased to note that this issue includes the latest SJTG-sponsored lecture together with a set of commentaries and a response. Details are in the table below: Each year since 2000, the journal has sponsored a lecture presented by leading scholars of tropical geographies at a major international geography or geoscience conference. The full list is on the SJTG's homepage (see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679493). In 2025, departing from tradition, three separate SJTG lectures were sponsored at different conferences. The other two, also with commentaries and responses, will appear in future issues. In addition to a mix of regular papers, special lecture papers, book reviews and review essays (including a recent one on ‘Topographies of climate as a keyword: He, 2025), in 2025, the September issue of the SJTG also published a review forum on Scott Kirsch's (2023) American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire (Lentz et al., 2025). The forum was derived from an Author-Meets-Critics session held at the 2025 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Detroit. A similar forum, revisiting a book published three decades earlier, Women's Voices from the Rainforest by Janet Gabriel Townsend (in collaboration with Ursula Arrevillaga, Jennie Bain, Socorro Cancino, Susan F. Frenk, Silvana Pacheco and Elia Pérez) was also published in the May 2025 issue (Volume 46, Number 2). Details are tabulated below: This forum too began as a conference session (at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, held in London in August 2024). After a long and distinguished career, mostly at Durham University, England, Janet sadly passed away in 2023 (see McEwan, 2023). The SJTG is proud to publish the forum and pays tribute to Janet's achievements and influence.