Bad Bunny beginning his incredible Super Bowl performance in a sugar cane plantation – perfect timing for my undergrad class on plantation geographies and the plantationocene this friday ...

hollow ponds, waltham forest 📍

An exciting early Christmas present has just arrived !! The New Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology - featuring a chapter I co-authored on queer political ecology - is out in 2026. Can’t wait to read through all the other chapters…

Assemblage, archive, and ancestor: Developing more‐than‐human historical geography with salmon This paper interrogates recent geographic literature on the more-than-human archive and argues that there needs to be more specificity when conceptualising and researching the more-than-human. It the...

🚨new paper🚨 excited to publish this paper on salmon, archives & more-than-human historical geography in geographical research!! the article will appear in a special issue on nature in/and/of the archive that has been put together by @ayanassar.bsky.social & Jessica Lehman.

doi.org/10.1111/1745...

Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid politics On his centenary, Bauman’s pessimistic utopianism is a lesson for the left – and the Labour Party

magazine.newstatesman.com/2025/11/19/z...

Surrealism Against Fascism • EQUATOR A century ago, artists who survived the trenches captured humanity’s capacity for destruction. What can they teach us about confronting the far-right in a new age of genocide?

new naomi klein in equator magazine is great - and making me rethink my tepid response to this surrealism exhibition ! www.equator.org/articles/sur...

amazingly produced zine from queer patch - group of sinophone queer / feminist researchers. look out for launches in various cities across 2026

In case you missed it: see our CfP for the AAG 2026 below 👇

CfP AAG 2026: New Fluvial Geographies AAG 2026: New Fluvial Geographies: critical currents in riverine thought, practice & activism Human geography is currently experiencing a river moment. Over the past decade, as the discipline has em...

CfP #AAG2026 New Fluvial Geographies: critical currents in riverine thought, practice and activism.

We are organising a session to discuss the recent and exciting surge in human and environmental geographic scholarship on rivers. Full call here: docs.google.com/document/d/1.... Please share!

Screenshot of a paper abstract in Transactions by Austin Read (2025) entitled 'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' with a red banner at the top. Exploring the colonial geographies that have shaped Britain, this paper argues that recent debates regarding the ecological status of British rivers must centre colonialism and racial capitalism as the crucial drivers of river decline and thus prioritise developing anticolonial ecological politics. I anchor this argument in the River Severn in southwest Britain, which, until recently, was fragmented by hydraulic infrastructures such as weirs and canals. I examine here a conservation project that has built fish passes to reconnect the Severn's divided ecologies and unsettle technocratic framings of it as a silver bullet solution that bypasses political quagmires. I point instead to the five centuries of racial capitalist geographies that have shaped the Severn and insist that these cannot be avoided through engineering ingenuity. This paper's arguments are complex because entrenched spatial dichotomies of core/periphery have resulted in a lack of attention to how colonial geographies have shaped British ecologies like the Severn. The central contribution of this article is thus its development of a spatially relational theory and method of infrastructure as a colonial archive that can disrupt dichotomous core/periphery imaginaries and render spatially discontinuous and differential colonial geographies visible. I empirically develop this theory of infrastructure as an archive by deploying it to analyse the records of the Severn Navigation Commissioners (1835–c.1948), the body responsible for the infrastructural disciplining of the Severn.

#OpenAccess in TIBG:

'Infrastructure as archive: Examining the colonial geographies of rivers' by @austinread.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1111/tran... #geosky #geo

The paper is about the overlooked ways that British rivers have been shaped by colonial histories and geographies. I develop a theory/method of "infrastructure as archive" to trace imperial geographies of rivers, and to challenge spatial binaries of "core" and "periphery"

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | RGS Journal | Wiley Online Library This paper begins by looking at a biodiversity conservation project on the River Severn (UK) and argues that dominant technocratic framings of it ignore the colonial legacies that shape the river. It...

my new paper is now published open access in @rgsibg.bsky.social Transactions journal: doi.org/10.1111/tran...

Newsletter #1: May 2025 The Green Party leadership election, Britain’s postimperial spatial politics & reading, watching and listening digest

my first post on substack is available to read now! Newsletter #1: May 2025 open.substack.com/pub/occasion...