Browsed by
Tag: conference

Conference organizing lessons from the Human Geography subculture at the 2023 Swiss Geosciences Meeting

Conference organizing lessons from the Human Geography subculture at the 2023 Swiss Geosciences Meeting

After conferences, I often write here about lessons learned (like on the 2019 SGM in Fribourg). This weekend, I learned more than usual. This weekend I learned an awful lot. One of my tasks as new VP of the Swiss Association of Geography is to organize the human geography contributions at the annual Swiss Geosciences Meeting. I’ve organized my share of things before but this was a new experience, both in terms of scope and also because our contributions are…

Read More Read More

A quick summary of my keynote in Riga: Ethics and the everyday in times of global crisis

A quick summary of my keynote in Riga: Ethics and the everyday in times of global crisis

Last week I had the pleasure and honor of giving the Eurasian Geography and Economics keynote lecture at the 10th International Urban Geographies of Post-Communist States conference. This year it was in Riga – my first time there. The opening was held in this gorgeous Stalinka that has been mostly de-Sovietized. It was a very fitting venue. This was the 10th edition of the “Cities After Transition” conference – our beloved CATference. In my keynote, I took stock of the…

Read More Read More

A year in the life of an academic: 2022 summary

A year in the life of an academic: 2022 summary

It’s been a big year. Here’s a rundown of how it went for me. I started off 2022 with a nice interview on Deutsche Welle about the lack of sustainability at the Beijing Olympics. It was filmed from my living room office at home, still under lockdown from Covid-19. I remember being particularly grateful for them giving me a decent amount of space for nuanced discussion. This is not always the case with media interviews, unfortunately. DW one stood out…

Read More Read More

The Hard Edge of Soft Power: My keynote at the (Il)liberal Nation Projection symposium

The Hard Edge of Soft Power: My keynote at the (Il)liberal Nation Projection symposium

Vitaly Kazakov at the University of Manchester invited me to give one of the keynotes at a symposium he organized. Over two intense and enjoyable days, we explored various national projection strategies from illiberal and democratic states across different contexts, channels, and platforms. It was interdisciplinary, relevant, and exciting. A real honor to attend. I wrote a short twitter thread about it: My keynote explored the uncomfortable connections between the Russian mega-event decade and the war in Ukraine. Here’s a…

Read More Read More

Play the Game – a new and refreshing kind of conference

Play the Game – a new and refreshing kind of conference

I’ve heard of Play the Game, of course, because most of my critical sports friends and colleagues have participated at one time or another. I also contributed a commentary for a series on Protest and the Games organized by Dennis Pauschinger and John Lauermann, where I wrote about the challenges of protesting mega-events in Russia. But until now, I’d never attended the actual conference. This time, I spoke about the uncomfortable intersections between sport and war, in a talk called…

Read More Read More

Five days working for a better Olympics in Paris

Five days working for a better Olympics in Paris

With Covid seemingly diminished for the time being, I was finally able to get on the ground in Paris. Long overdue! I spoke at a days-long transnational anti-Olympics summit, at an academic event with more standard scholarly presentations, and at something like a philosophical salon devoted to exploring the nuances of Paris 2024. Vive la France! It was a very busy week. With the anti-Olympics crowd, I spoke three times: about the declining sustainability of the Olympics over time, about…

Read More Read More

The absolutely last virtual talk of 2021: Paris / Tokyo / Mega-Events

The absolutely last virtual talk of 2021: Paris / Tokyo / Mega-Events

Usually, when I give a talk, I’m sharing work in progress. The conference is, for me, a way to share my ideas, to learn who else is working on similar directions, and hopefully to fill in some of the gaps in my work as I get it ready for writing. This time, however, it was something new. I spoke at a conference called “Olympic Games and Global Cities”, organized by the Fondation France-Japon at l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences…

Read More Read More

Imprisoned for a retweet: Swiss Geoscience Meeting 2021

Imprisoned for a retweet: Swiss Geoscience Meeting 2021

I’m not going to lie – I miss the energy of conferences in real life. I’ve given a lot of talks this year, and while I’m grateful for the opportunities that virtual participation gives you, I find it increasingly hard to focus during these marathon online conferences. A happy exception to this trend was the session organized by my friend Dennis Pauschinger at this year’s Swiss Geoscience Meeting in virtual Geneva. Dennis hosted a session called “Policing the city: State…

Read More Read More

The give and take of virtual conferences

The give and take of virtual conferences

I finished a month of rather active conference participation, first at the American Association of Geographer’s annual meeting in virtual Seattle, and then the Dislocating Urban Studies workshop in virtual Malmö. I have mixed feelings about our new virtual world. One obvious benefit is the ability to participate in exciting discussions from around the globe, without paying for transit, dealing with jet-lag, or contributing to the destruction of the climate. Via Zoom, I’m able to be in Seattle on Tuesday…

Read More Read More

Lessons from the Congress on Youth and Winter Sports 2020

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 contributors and I was happy to sit on the sidelines this time as an organizer instead of presenting or, more typically for me, doing both…

Read More Read More