Abstract
This chapter aims to trace the genealogy of urban social justice within the Annals to understand its origins since the journal’s first publication in 1911 and gesture at where it might be going. It considers the political discussions of justice and injustice up to the radical turn in the discipline that prefigured what would become social justice as a dominant theme of investigation in geography. The chapter shows that the rapid theoretical development of social justice in its variegated forms after the turn up to this special issue. Normative approaches to social justice were absent in the early issues of the Annals. There were theoretical precursors, however, that prefigured what ultimately became some of the most important political ideas in those early issues. The more contemporary archives of the Annals show the continued interest of geographers in big questions about justice, ethics, democracy, and political relevance of geographic scholarship.