Gaurav and I are looking forward to your abstracts on the geographies of dignity:

The Geographical Journal | RGS Research Journal | Wiley Online Library This commentary discusses the idea of reversibility in relation to large infrastructure projects, using the example of the Euston train station redevelopment in London, UK. I suggest that there shoul....

I wrote something about HS2 at Euston. It's a rant, pretending to be a theoretical piece about infrastructural reversibility

rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Could you re-post please @tsuoxford.bsky.social ?

Are you attending the RGS Annual Conference in London in September? Consider submitting an abstract to the session

Negotiating Dignity: Rethinking Justice in Geographical Research

organised by Gaurav Mittal and myself

Details of all CfPs here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Deadline 20 February

A moment many years in the making – it's time to check proofs of my forthcoming book, Power Plants, due out in June with @manchesterup.bsky.social!
Somehow, this has snuck on to the AAG's Winter 2025 books list – which looks great (www.aag.org/new-books-fo...).
Preorder by end of Jan for 40% off 🌿🌲🌳

New TSU Seminar Series for 2026! Dr Abdal Hamid al Masri (Homs University) kicks off with a talk that examines challenges of transport, mobility, and traffic in and around Homs, a central Syrian city in the post-war and reconstruction era. 25th Feb - 12pm online only us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Heading to @bertsbooks.bsky.social this afternoon to treat a young reader to a new book of their choice. Spoiler, it's going to be another Grimwood!

Come work with me on a new DUT-funded project on young carers and urban mobility! 2-year postdoc at @tsuoxford.bsky.social : my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

CfP special issue on "Decolonising Research in Transport Geography", in JTG. Please help us spread the word!
Deadline 30 Sep 2026
More info www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...
Guest editors:
Qiyang Liu, Peking
Zihao An, U. Leeds
Rafael H. M. Pereira, Ipea
Zahara Batool, Leeds
Tim Schwanen, Oxford

Adopt Ambitious Air Quality Standards into UK Law 🫁 Support our call for urgent clean air action Toxic air isn’t just an environmental issue — it’s a health emergency. It contributes to lung cancer, worsens asthma and COPD, and harms children’s…

Please sign @asthmaandlung.org.uk's petition calling for stronger #AirPollution limits in the UK.

The UK's legal levels for NO2 are four times higher than the safe level recommended by the World Health Organization. If the EU can come into line with interim @who.int levels, surely the UK can?

Dystopian Fiction Prize The Orwell Society organises an annual short story competition for current students (both BA and MA) at British universities. We look for dystopian narratives of 3,000 words, following the dedicated t...

The Orwell Society Prize for Dystopian Fiction 2026 is now open for submissions from people studying at a UK university: orwellsociety.com/charitable-a...

If you work in UK HE, please publicize widely!

I’ve been a judge since the prize’s inception; it’s such a privilege to read the submissions.

Let me know if you would like a pdf of the full text.

More about CAMINUP here: dutpartnership.eu/projects/cam...

Who would you plan urban mobility for?

Historically, cities have prioritised white collar commuters

As part of a new DUT-backed project, we suggest that starting with young carers and their (im)mobilities can inform inclusive transport planning.

We set out the case here:
doi.org/10.1016/j.jt...

LLMs follow a “Kepler-esque” approach: they can successfully predict the next position in a planet’s orbit, but fail to find the underlying explanation of Newton’s Law of Gravity (see here). Instead, they resort to fitting made-up rules, that allow them to successfully predict the planet’s next orbital position, but these models fail to find the force vector at the heart of Newton’s insight. The MIT-Harvard paper is explained in this video. LLMs cannot and do not infer physical laws from their training data. Remarkably, they cannot even identify the relevant information from the internet. Instead, they make it up.

www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives...

Fantastic article on AI and why it will let you down. Passage below is my favourite.

Join us for our seminar series ‘Mobility and Urbanisation in Palestine.’ Starting Wed 29 Oct, 3pm online

Dr Zahraa Zawawi, An-Najah National University in Nablus, will discuss ‘Sustainable Urban Planning for Urban Expansion/ Development in the West Bank, Palestine’

Register: tinyurl.com/3n8kxn6s

Joint BME Small Grants The Social History Society administers a Small Grants Fund to support research, events and activities undertaken by BME historians or focused on the histories of BME people The scheme was launched …

📢 Applications are now open for the Joint BME Small Grants scheme, supporting research, events & activities by BME historians or on BME histories.

💸 Grants up to £1000.
⏰Deadline: 27 Nov 2025.

#history #apply #funding #opportunity

socialhistory.org.uk/funding/bme-...

The viral statue attributed to Jaume Plensa and located in Barcelona that doesn't actually exist A fake AI-generated image sparks thousands of reactions: How to stop the lie?

So we want more people to have the skills to engage critically with the ambiguous stuff circulating in a post-truth online world?

Turns out, those History of Art degrees were not such a bad idea after all.

en.ara.cat/culture/the-...

This has been my favourite episode of the Antisocial Economics podcast so far - but they are all excellent.

Looking forward to the annual conference of the @rgsibg.bsky.social and rediscovering Birmingham after too many years of only being there long enough to transfer between trains.

Using DuckDuckGo for web searches is great - not missing the ads, not missing the (frequently inaccurate) AI summaries.

Mammoth Education – Global Brand Consultancy for Education Brand Thinking for Education Marketing. UK's leading brand consultants for universities, trusted to deliver large-scale transformation programmes that redefine institutional identity and reputation.

The consultants who worked on Warwick have done a few others it seems (but not "Beyonder"!): mammoth.tv/education/

🚨 Today we publish State of the North 2025 🚨

The North gets just half as much arts and culture funding per person as London. We reveal the impact this & other regional divides have on young people, and what must change 👇

www.ippr.org/articles/the...

Minority Rule **A Guardian Book of the Summer 2025**** The instant top 5 Sunday Times bestseller from political commentator Ash Sarkar **'One of the boldest and most exciting…

Ash Sarkar's book 'Minority Rule' is brilliant - incisive, funny, depressing, but also strangely empowering account of the last few years in UK politics

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/minority-...

Cartoon showing street scene with lots of cars, some of which are on or blocking pavements. One bike is also parked on a pavement. A couple are saying ‘Look - someone’s left a hire bike on the pavement’.

New drawing: Hire bike

Notes on this cartoon: open.substack.com/pub/diagramc...

London’s low-traffic zones ‘cut deaths and injuries by more than a third’ Exclusive: Study also finds no change in number of casualties on roads just outside low-traffic neighbourhoods

Great to see outputs from the NİHR LTNs in London project starting to be published.

Huge public health benefits of LTNs.

'Across the LTNs as a whole, the authors said, an estimated 613 injuries were prevented, including 100 deaths or serious injuries'

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Are we leaving parts of the country behind in the EV transition?

Labib Azzouz & Hannah Budnitz @tsuoxford.bsky.social explore the uneven rollout of electric vehicle charging points across the UK.

I have discussed AI use with many colleagues and friends. Some of them work in research, teaching, and administration in higher education; others have generously shared experiences from other sectors. I am now fully convinced that the costs of using AI as part of my work – to myself; to the environment; to the precariously employed people who maintain these systems ‘behind the scenes,’ and face harm as a result – far outweigh the benefits. As a result, I have decided to make a pledge not to use AI in my professional work. I am sharing this pledge firstly, for accountability; and secondly, because I hope to amplify the minority of voices who remind us that this is not the unstoppable march of history and progress; just one type of technology that we can buy into, or not. My own view is that AI use is not universally beneficial, necessary, or inevitable. Maybe the costs and benefits will shift later on. But for now, I am going to keep AI out of my research, teaching, and outreach work; I will not use it to make slides, to get a quick summary of others’ work, to write up my own, or to reply to emails. There are practical limits to this choice: averting my eyes when my default search engine puts AI-generated results in front of me may be a step too far. But wherever opting out is a feasible option, I will opt out.

Where I am with AI

Union vows to fight cuts at Liverpool Hope Liverpool Hope University intends to axe 39 staff before the end of the year, announced the University and College Union (UCU) today

Devastated to learn that EVERY SINGLE ONE of my former #DisabilityStudies colleagues at Liverpool Hope are at risk of redundancy. Lovely people and a brilliant team that has transformed the lives of so many students. If you know them please do reach out - things are very tough right now.

We particularly hope to hear from researchers with experience in participatory mapping with children and young people (not necessarily in a road safety context)

Do contact either Xiao or me if you want to discuss informally.