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Author: Sven Daniel Wolfe

More advising advice: do you need a kind word or a kick in the pants?

More advising advice: do you need a kind word or a kick in the pants?

I’m not naive enough to pretend there are many readers here, but I’ve been keeping this public notebook of academic musings for awhile now, and every so often I get a letter in response. This one was from a PhD student who read my thoughts last month on mental health and the academy. It got me thinking about not-so-visible dividing lines. These plagued me when I made the decision to go to graduate school and embark on a PhD. It…

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Unstable soft power – new article in print

Unstable soft power – new article in print

This was a highlight of my year. I’ve long admired the work on soft power and mega-events by Jonathan Grix and friends, and I had some ideas on soft power myself. But I intended these ideas as a refinement of the notion of soft power, not as a criticism per se of Grix et al. I wanted to suggest that there were a few ways that we could augment our traditional understandings of soft power in order to account for…

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4 points on the compass: a brief mental health orientation for PhD students (and others!)

4 points on the compass: a brief mental health orientation for PhD students (and others!)

Since I won’t be hosting a session on mental health and the academy at this year’s Swiss Geosciences Meeting, I thought I would sketch out here the ideas that I was planning to share. These are 4 basic principles that helped me when I was going through some emotional challenges during my PhD. Some of them are adapted from the University of Zurich’s excellent Stress Management course, and others were honed over time in conversation with other graduate students and…

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Potemkin Neoliberalism – new article in print

Potemkin Neoliberalism – new article in print

It’s out in the world! I’m very happy about this paper. While it flows from the same place as my doctoral research, it’s a separate piece that stands on its own. Here, I advance the concept of Potemkin Neoliberalism, exploring various dimensions of superficiality in the articulation of the 2018 Men’s Football World Cup in Russia. Starting from the idea that mega-events are an expression of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism, I uncover how – unlike many other mega-events – this World…

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Thoughts on how to survive and savor the academic writing process.

Thoughts on how to survive and savor the academic writing process.

I’m writing these notes from a position of unstable privilege. I’m officially a junior lecturer, and I have the luxury of a work contract that gives me several years of predictability. I know how rare that is in the academy and I’m grateful for it. At the same time, this contract will expire in mid/late 2022, and if I don’t secure a suitable post before then, my family and I will have to leave our home in this country and…

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A Soviet interpretation on the quintessential American mega-event

A Soviet interpretation on the quintessential American mega-event

This booklet is a rarity. Shipped all the way to Zurich from a legendary leftist bookstore in San Francisco (“fighting commodity fetishism with commodity fetishism since 1981”), this is a Soviet broadside against Reagan’s America, seen through the lens of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Back when I was living in Russia, a good friend once shared his secret for detecting nationalist media bias. I was complaining about the difficulties in writing critically about Russia because I was worried about playing…

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The Great Pause, new article in print

The Great Pause, new article in print

So, thanks to the great scholar and my good friend Michael Gentile, I had the opportunity to put some of these pandemic ideas into a quick publication for one my favorite journals: Eurasian Geography and Economics. I’m really happy with this one. It was a quick job with a tight deadline but it was fun to write. And I’m grateful that I was given the chance to use minor theory to try and make sense of these global issues. If…

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The Great Pause, continued

The Great Pause, continued

My hope, as I’ve written before, is that this time away from the normal processes of sustaining and reproducing our lives would give us the opportunity – both individually and societally – to rethink how things are. Obviously this is culturally dependent and different places have different values, but I’m referring to my experiences in the industrial north, ranging from Russia to the United States, with a smattering of more progressive western European nations to boot. So what am I…

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Two Drops of Oil

Two Drops of Oil

It’s probably not very academic to mention Paulo Coelho, I suppose, because of his new age connotations and the seductive sense of superiority that we get from relying on citations and peer review and institutional frameworks. But I don’t care, because it’s Week Forever of the Covid19 lockdown, I don’t talk with anyone outside of my immediate clan and the occasional chat with an armored grocery store worker, and everything everywhere is different. My zoom colleagues (now there’s a phrase…

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The Great Pause

The Great Pause

I’m sick of looking at logarithmic scales and comparing infection rates among different nations. I can’t peel myself away from the data, though, looking at site after site after site. I text with friends and family around the world, comparing the news media to lived experience. I feel lucky. I feel guilty. I feel scared. I’m continuing my work as best I can. My university suspended activities. My kids are home from school too and everything would be fine except…

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