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Tag: publication

Submitting a new collaboration on the Russian war against Ukraine

Submitting a new collaboration on the Russian war against Ukraine

As part of my current project, I’ve just submitted a draft of a new piece called The Intimate and Everyday Geopolitics of the Russian War Against Ukraine. It’s a Forum collection for Geopolitics, and at this point I’m very pleased with it. Writing about the war during the war has not been easy. I gathered four co-authors for the project, two from Ukraine and two from Russia – though this is not at all meant to establish some kind of…

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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…

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New article: Building a better host city? Reforming and contesting the Olympics in Paris 2024

New article: Building a better host city? Reforming and contesting the Olympics in Paris 2024

I’m very happy with this article. It came out a while ago but I haven’t written about it until now, except for this Twitter thread. The general idea is to explore the implications of the New Norm Olympic reforms as played out on the ground in Paris. This is one of the publications I promised as part of my postdoc project at the University of Lausanne. That project is now very nearly concluded, so it’s time to take stock of…

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Blurry Microgeographies of the New Normal

Blurry Microgeographies of the New Normal

I seem to have developed a bit of a side gig writing about covid. Back in April 2020, I wrote a small blog about the Great Pause. It feels funny to read it now, of course, because we now know what the ruptures to the status quo did and did not accomplish. But at the same time it’s interesting to look back at the early days of the pandemic, if for no other reason than to satisfy a sort of…

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An extremely happy new year to you and yours

An extremely happy new year to you and yours

So I published a book! It looks like this: And I know it’s not perfect by any means, and I’d love to have a go at bringing some of the chapters more in line with my current thinking. But that’s the way this game is played, and I have to admit that I am overjoyed at holding an actual copy in my actual hands. You can get a copy here, at the fine and wonderful publisher. Or, if you’d like,…

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Book review: Global Finance, Local Control – by Igor Logvinenko

Book review: Global Finance, Local Control – by Igor Logvinenko

I love book reviews. I love reading them and I love writing them. Reading them is great – in a world where so much amazing research is published every day, it seems impossible to keep up. But book reviews help make that work easier. Frankly I wish ordinary academic articles would have a digest like this as well. Sure, it’s depressing that our world is so rapid that we aren’t given the time to sit back and enjoy reading articles….

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Between the minor and the intimate. New publication in Geopolitics!

Between the minor and the intimate. New publication in Geopolitics!

I’m extremely happy with this article. It was a tough road but a valuable one. The seed was planted by the excellent Michele Lancione, who I was lucky enough to meet at a workshop in Neuchâtel in 2019. Michele introduced me to his approach to micropolitics and minor ethics, which he’d written about back in 2017. I’d missed that article, unfortunately, but was deeply moved and inspired by his talk and by our later conversations. After our meeting, I returned…

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Cancel the summer of super-spreader mega-events

Cancel the summer of super-spreader mega-events

This being a personal academic blog, obviously I tend to share more of my successes rather than setbacks or failures. That said, I think it’s important to share some of the more challenging moments too, so that’s what this one will be about. Back in 2015, I was fortunate enough to have a commentary on mega-events and public health published in The Lancet – certainly a highlight for any early career academic. With a number of high profile mega-events back…

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New special issue out now: The urban and economic impacts of mega-events

New special issue out now: The urban and economic impacts of mega-events

It’s been a long road, but finally our special issue is complete and out in the (virtual) world at last. Some lessons learned about special issues and collaborative publishing projects: It’s going to take longer than you want or expect. Everyone is busy, overwhelmed, working on a last-minute project. Budget in more time than you think you need. A clear project plan is your best friend. I made an excel file that had every contributor and every contribution, along with…

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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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