Following hot on the heels of a very timely and challenging special issue ‘Community development and financialization: making the connections’, this current issue of the Community Development Journal includes a themed section on Territorial Stigmatization along with four regular articles. As we have indicated in previous editorials, we are keen to ensure that this journal, along with its welcoming of submissions from a wide range of geographical contexts, actively makes space for cutting-edge theorizations of those contemporary issues that profoundly impact the lives of people in communities and which call out for collective responses. To date, we have published three themed sections in the journal; ‘Community Organizing’, ‘Post-2015: What Should Be the Contribution of Community Development in the New Global Development Framework?’ and ‘Researching Radical Community Development Projects in 1970s Britain’. We see these ‘sections’ as providing readers with an entrée to the evolving fields of study and as highlighting the ‘state of the art’ with respect to the associated academic research and theory. Crucially, it is envisaged that these thematized collections of articles will in turn stimulate submissions that respond to, extend and critically engage with the provocations contained within them through a distinctive (but still expansive) community development lens.