We arrive 10 minutes before the appointed 1:00 pm deadline on my invitation letter. It reads less as an invitation and more as a list of instructions, but represents the final step on my road to Canadian citizenship. The large waiting room is already packed, families in nice clothes, children laughing and running around, those … Continue reading On becoming Canadian
How (not) to conference
In early April, I once again attended the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), this time in Washington, DC. While there, I presented, along with my research assistant/co-author, a paper on the geographies of rotationality in the US and Canadian foreign services. Rotationality is a basic condition of work in almost all … Continue reading How (not) to conference
Two years and some links
I have now been doing this blog, with an increasingly haphazard publication schedule, for two years. The pace of writing has slowed considerably as I have taken on more administrative duties in my department, where I am now undergraduate program chair and the principal academic advisor, tried to buckle down and refocus some effort on … Continue reading Two years and some links
Don’t worry about the government
I have not written much here lately. The end of the fall semester and beginning of the winter semester have, in short, been kicking my ass. This is fine, I think; I have been busy but productive and, unlike those people I know who work in the US federal government, I have still been getting … Continue reading Don’t worry about the government
The classroom, redux
Last December I wrote a long, convoluted piece about the university classroom as a space of respect, responsibility, and, possibly, late capitalist hegemony. I want to briefly revisit some of this as I come once again to the close of the fall semester and with another iteration of my first-year introductory human geography course, 45-120 … Continue reading The classroom, redux
Voting from afar
This is a short tale about my voting experience this year in the US general election, scheduled for November 6. I reside and work in Canada, as I have for more than 14 years now, but I am still a US citizen, registered to vote in Kentucky, as I have been since I was 18 … Continue reading Voting from afar
Ecological dystopia
On October 8, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report detailing the urgent need to curb greenhouse gas emissions and limit anthropogenic global warming to 1.5ºC, with immediate and dramatic action necessary by 2030. You would never know this from the report's official title, which straddles the line between the nomenclature … Continue reading Ecological dystopia
