Category: Academic Life
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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.…
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Building Urban Studies in Switzerland – GeoAgenda! Done!
It’s out! Please download, read, and share! A pretty massive nationwide effort, all told, and yet we did it! I can’t quite express how grateful I am to all the contributors for getting this done so quickly and so well. It was practically an impossible project, deadline-wise, and yet we did it. So what is…
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Slowness
I know there’s value in slowness, whether in thinking, eating, or spicy Czech-French novels. There’s more, of course, but I’m impatient. I know good work takes time, and I don’t want to rush it. And I love being part of this academic world and having the privilege and luxury of spending my days like this,…
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Lessons from the Congress on Youth and Winter Sports 2020
We organized a series of sessions at the Congress on Youth and Winter Sports 2020 in Lausanne, tied to the Youth Olympic Games. Our sessions were entitled Events, Cities, and Urbanism and focused on the connections between mega-events and urban development from a variety of perspectives. The papers were great, I thought. We had wonderful…
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A Publication Project in a Last-Minute Rush
I’m not the kind of person who likes saying no, which I’ve heard is the “most important word in academia.” As I progress on this path, though, I’ve learned to be more judicious about the things I take on, because I don’t want to sacrifice quality in what I do. That’s a tough balance, though,…
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Session hosting lessons from the 2019 Swiss Geosciences meeting
I was in Fribourg for the 2019 Swiss Geoscience Meeting, and I was part of the newly expanded options for human geography. In 2018, there was only one series of sessions for human geographers, but this year our presence ballooned and we had three parallel streams. It was really well attended too, for the most…
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Session hosting lessons from the 2019 International Urban Geographies of Post-communist States Conference – aka the CAT-ference
So I went to Belgrade to my favorite conference, the CAT-ference. I consider this my home conference, if such a thing were possible – the place where I feel most comfortable. Honestly I love everything about it: the conference atmosphere is the best I’ve ever seen, and the themes are right up my alley. It’s…
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Some history
Back in 2012, I lost my job in San Francisco. Our whole company did. One day I went into work and the atmosphere was horrible – people were scurrying around, carrying boxes, holding back tears. A bunch of suits had flown out from New York and laid everyone off. Some left that day, and some…
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My PhD mood, longitudinally. Part 3.
So this is the final installment of my probably unnecessarily detailed qualitative and quantitative dissertation analysis. Part 1 is here and you can read Part 2 here, if you want to get up to speed. In those previous installments, my work appeared sporadic and chaotic, with my mood all over the map. Lots of disappointments,…