In what could plausibly represent a Christmas miracle* SFU Geography has two (2) new tenure track hires. One is urban/climate, which I will repost below. The other is a Landscape Ecologist. Please share ... #academicsky *actually just the good decisions of our new Dean www.sfu.ca/geography/ab...

This piece on Locating Crisis, along with the other fascinating commentaries, now has a home in Vol 3.3 of Dialogues in Urban Research! journals.sagepub.com/toc/DUS/curr...

I got to write about our global waste problem for @lrb.co.uk, in dialogue with 3 really good books, by @alexclapp.bsky.social, Oliver Franklin-Wallis and John Scanlan. You can read it here:

A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women 🧵

I love to see stuff like this because it helps explain to people trapped in tech-sponsored information bubbles the actually obvious fact that universities teach people to know & think things, and AI is a way to produce the effect of knowing & thinking things w/o actually knowing & thinking them.

If I could change one thing about political reporting in New Zealand it would be the reflex to treat policy criticism from the political opposition as not only meaningful but the most important thing.

Does the government’s chief negotiator not understand how inflation works?

This is what Marsden Grants in Humanities (now scrapped!) and a decade of research can achieve — "a compelling and significant contribution to understanding the reordering of power that shaped Aotearoa in the nineteenth century". www.bwb.co.nz/books/garris... @bwbnz.bsky.social 👏 #NZHistory #history

Could I politely suggest, that with how Arts & Humanities research funding has been pulled from all of these, that political interference has already occurred.

there are a ton of changes in here but a huge one appears to be taking the Marsden fund, our main supporter of basic science, away from the Royal Society and handing it to a govt agency "Research Funding New Zealand" which does not yet exist

This Progress Report on Mobilities I: Crisis now has a home in Volume 49 Issue 5. #OpenAccess and alongside some excellent contributions all addressing crisis in its many forms @proghumgeog.bsky.social @uomhums.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/toc/PHG/curr...

Great piece on the politics of moving counter-hegemonic ideas into mainstream policy and practice. As this paper shows, there's not a huge amount of work bridging policy mobilities and the geographies of social movements, but really productive space for that work to be done.

The Caring Economies Symposium, hosted by Massey University, on recentering care in turbulent times, Wellington, October 17th www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/caring-eco...

New Open Access paper: "Moving ideas: An agenda for expanding the political scope of the policy mobilities approach" in @proghumgeog.bsky.social. Arguing that the #policymobilities & #socialmovements literatures can be combined to study counter-hegemonic activism. 1/6 tinyurl.com/88xmursz

I'm looking to refresh my geopolitics course next year (part of a geography programme) - are there any textbooks or recent works people would recommend?

Our pitch for constructivist economic geographies - Rachel Phillips, Chris Meulbroek, Jamie Peck, 2025 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

new zealand government reaching new heights of stupidity next year our public dollars will go more to AI grants ($70 million) than all investigator-initiated basic science combined ($56 million in the Marsden fund)

My book Understanding Policy Mobility is out this month, for anyone interested in my take on this literature that has emerged over the last 15 odd years www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/und...

Wonderful to see this out! A great read that looks at policy mobilities that really gets to the political, power laden and spatial aspects of these processes.

Worth a read! A concise & clearly argued guide to the critical literature on global-relational policymaking. … An essential starting point for those interested in policy-making’s role in world-making.

My book Understanding Policy Mobility is out this month, for anyone interested in my take on this literature that has emerged over the last 15 odd years www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/und...

Quick question: what the fuck is anyone talking about anymore

A better framing for the article would have been how the covid house price boom showed the dangers of organising so much of the management of the economy around housing, not just for these folks and the people priced out, but more generally because of the lost years as it unwinds

Excellent piece calling bullshit on the story that NZ can and should transform our economy in the same ways that Ireland and Singapore shifted theirs.

“Deskilling” skilled professions is a core promise of technological projects, so it’s probably not best understood as a side-effect even if some of the people pushing generative AI see it that way themselves. If the erosion of thinking is unforeseen, that’s just (so to speak) for lack of thinking.

Inside the annual torment of the bird of the year contest

'Fewer graduates regret going to university than is widely assumed and the public have a more favourable view of universities than people imagine, according to new research.' 1/3

"AI can now produce essays credible enough to pass as human work. The humanities tend to reward theoretical fluency and stylistic polish-areas where AI excels...By contrast STEM subjects...are harder for AI to mimic." You understand we don't set essays to increase the total number of essays right?

Over the years I have made visuals for my geography courses. I'm going to start sharing them on this thread in no particular order or purpose other than I made them to make a specific point in a lecture. Feel free to use them with attribution if they're useful.

If you’re looking for a critical perspective on AI that’s accessible to students in a course on media, tech comm, or rhetoric and writing studies, consider this: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... Extractive Artificial Intelligence and Its Challenge to Technical Communication - Collin Bjork, 2025

The absolute state of this. NZ’s leading education thought leaders, none of whom have actually worked in education.

2/ But the problem of distributed authorship and the problem of reason were already present in the machine learning episteme before the actualisation of LLMs. And empirically so was the presence of Palantir in deportation regimes. It was already present.

Pleased this new progress report on Mobilities & Crisis is out #OpenAccess. I suggest that mobility isn't just about movement but also navigating the temporalities of ongoing hardship, where crisis is part of the lived experience rather than an exceptional event. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Worst decision universities ever made was to sell themselves as building 'work-based practice' and 'real world skills'. That's not what a university does, and as soon as it claims that it loses all relevance. The sector has painted itself into the tiniest of corners.

Incredibly sad news. I worked with Peter back in 2020 when he was coordinating efforts to call on the Scottish Minister of Public Health to increase access to opioid substitution prescribing during covid. He was a passionate advocate for Harm Reduction throughout his life. Thinking of his two boys x

Government members on Finance and Expenditure Committee just voted to use an AI bot to read submissions on the Regulatory Standards Bill🙄. Turns out democracy under this government is real people making submissions and computers reading them. 👎

WE ARE RELIEVED TO HEAR A U.S. COURT HAS RULED THAT TARIFFS AGAINST OUR ISLAND WERE ILLEGAL AND A SPECTACULAR MISUNDERSTANDING OF GEOGRAPHY, BIOLOGY, AND REALITY. FLIPPERS UP UNTIL WE ARE PERMANENTLY SHOWN DUE RESPECT. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER -PM Tuxley II

My current thing I'm thinking is the National Party really, really, really wants to do tax cuts, but they never get to govern with a surplus. They haven't had one to speak of since the 1990s. That's a couple of generations of Nat politicians, it must be infuriating

I believe this means the sun will set over the entirety of the British Empire tonight for the first time in several hundred years. Chagos is the dot below India on this map. Sunset in the Pitcairns (dot in the Pacific) will happen ~40 minutes before sunrise in Akrotiri and Dhekelia (dot on Cyprus).

My current thing I'm thinking is the National Party really, really, really wants to do tax cuts, but they never get to govern with a surplus. They haven't had one to speak of since the 1990s. That's a couple of generations of Nat politicians, it must be infuriating

More students are set to seek tertiary qualifications than the system is funded to support, and fee hike set to remain at 6 percent.

Working the conjuncture! @adamtooze.bsky.social brings me back to the classrooms, supervisor meetings and bars of my PhD with this discussion of conjuctural analysis using @jamiepeck.bsky.social 's work. Could hear Jamie's voice in my head while reading this. adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

Shots fired! Verity Johnson goes HARD on the #PayEquity Bill and the female politicians endorsing it. #nzpol

Can I summarise the Reg Standards Bill situation: - The govt is breaching the first proposed principle as we speak. - 0.33% of submissions support it. - Officials only read the substance of 4% of subs - Official advice in the cab paper & RIS from multiple agencies is that the Bill is a bad idea.

📢March Issue of TIBG📢 The latest issue of TIBG brings together a collection on 'Mapping' curated by @stephenlegg11.bsky.social ahead of the 2024 RGS-IBG Annual Conference. 12 of the 17 papers are #OpenAccess - read them here ⬇️ rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14755661... #geosky

The tl;dr: In my opinion, there has been massive underinvestment in infrastructure in so many councils in NZ: RW'ers always standing on a "keep rates low" platform while maintenance and investment falls behind. Now we have to play catch-up.

Aisling Gallagher pointed out how administratively complex rebates for childcare are when this was announced, amongst other problems www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/...

This! I'm aware of how difficult it has been for a well educated couple to deal with two young children and the admin around this, despite having all the resources needed to claim effectively. Imagine being a bit less privileged. No wonder their figures are so low. It was always going to happen.

Willis went ahead anyway and now she is blaming IRD