He refers here to Singapore as an example to justify cutting the public sector to 60,000, but Singapore has 158,000 public servants, including 89000 in the core civil servants against a population of 6.1m.

It's a growing problem in political discourse in NZ that our right-leaning politicians will borrow talking points from overseas regardless of how irrelevant those talking points are to our reality. We can't have serious discussions if one side wants to make things up.

More evidence that @mkblyth.bsky.social talk below applies to NZ bsky.app/profile/henr...

The Massive Attack/Tom Waits collab we've all been waiting for. www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-57...

New paper in @proghumgeog.bsky.social. Some great colleagues' work is sampled @jennifer-clapp.bsky.social @landstuff.bsky.social @brettchristophers.bsky.social @azadehakbari.bsky.social @jamiepeck.bsky.social @reijer.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #geosky #ipesky

They’re all so obsessed with her..

This is worth listening to from a New Zealand perspective because of the context it puts around the LNG import terminal plan and the general turn against the green transition by the current government

This is worth listening to from a New Zealand perspective because of the context it puts around the LNG import terminal plan and the general turn against the green transition by the current government

Underrated that the era of neoliberal globalism characterized by fierce defense of intellectual property as rents, patents, and copyrights gave way so quickly to a new paradigm marked by the blithe plunder of all human creativity for LLM training data.

In new issue of Progress in Human Geography: "Moving ideas: An agenda for expanding the political scope of the policy mobilities approach." Connects policy mobilities & social movements studies. Focus on geogs of counterhegemonic ideas. Abstract 👇 #academicsky journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

It never ceases to confound me just how many folks think the point of essays is to provide teachers with essays. That teachers just like, collect them, or need them for sustenance or something. Rather than the point of them being the *actual fucking act of learning how to think about shit*

We're recruiting 2 PhD candidates in human geography here in Uppsala, one position focused on urban/housing issues and one in political ecology. Please spread the word/repost etc. Being a PhD student in Sweden is a good gig.

This week the UN ECOSOC’s Partnership Forum is foregrounding cities via SDG 11, on sustainable, inclusive urban futures. A good reminder from this @urbangeography.bsky.social piece on the imperatives & paradoxes of gender mainstreaming in urban policy & theory www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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. 👎