I’m extremely happy with this one. This came to life from a rough paper I presented at University College London’s Urban Lab, but it really took shape through the peer review process at Antipode. I’m going to be honest here: there was a lot of tough feedback, and it definitely threw me for a loop. It took a bit of time for me to recover composure enough to start thinking about how to address the problems and improve. The reason…
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…
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…
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…
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 this? I contacted (almost) every university in Switzerland in order to solicit short articles, loosely referenced where appropriate, to explain what research on the urban…
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, especially at these early career stages where I’m feeling severe pressure to publish a) brilliant stuff, and b) a lot of it… or c) die…
Note: this was originally slated to be a commentary piece for a non peer-reviewed expert journal that shall remain nameless. For reasons I still don’t understand, the editor never wrote me back after commissioning and receiving the piece. I found it again recently during some computer cleanup, and given that it’s over a year past the date they said they would publish – it was aimed for before the 2018 World Cup – I’m going to share the draft here….
Next step is for the esteemed jury to read through it, and then we’ll all meet for a private defense at the end of June. If I make it through that, then they’ll schedule a public defense for later in the summer. It feels odd, to tell the truth. I was sort of expecting angels singing, or at least a feeling of discernible triumph. But to be perfectly honest, it’s really quite mundane. You turn it in, the process begins,…