And only wear white or light-colored shirts.

That seems to be true across many fellowships and funding schemes lately.

Tired of people responding to videos of ICE arrests with “are they (migrants) illegal?” as if that settles anything.

I’m happy to share my first book—At the Feet of a War Elephant: Land, Displacement, and Urbanization in Myanmar—is forthcoming with @cornellupress.bsky.social in Mar 2027. It explores the slow violence of urban growth under capitalism and how dispossession is normalized even without formal planning

I got some heart-breaking messages from Myanmar friends about this new passport law.
Many fear that they will be forced to return to renew their passports, running the risk of arrest or conscription. Not to mention all the other additional problems with the law

www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/m...

[Question] What’s one phrase that, the moment you hear it, tells you exactly what kind of person you’re dealing with?
Mine: “reverse #racism”.

#academia
#academicchatter

Haven’t used #Grammarly for a while and just saw its new “AI Grader” feature, which predicts lecturers’ feedback on assignments without their input or consent--literally "putting words in someone's mouth". Reminds me of Ulrich Beck’s risk society and how we can become victims of our own “progress”.

มองประวัติศาสตร์ไทยผ่านชีวิต เลือดเนื้อ และความเจ็บปวดของนักโทษการเมือง : สนทนากับ ไทเรล ฮาเบอร์คอร์น  | ศูนย์ทนายความเพื่อสิทธิมนุษยชน ในประวัติศาสตร์การเมืองไทย ท่ามกลางการต่อสู้ช่วงชิงเพื่อเข้าสู่อำนาจและรักษาสถานะนำตลอดเกือบศตวรรษ ย่อมปรากฏว่ามีทั้งผู้แพ้และผู้ชนะ ผู้ชนะนั้น

On the subject of Letters from Political Prisoners: @turtelista.bsky.social recently both gave an interview to Thai Lawyers for Human Rights:
tlhr2014.com/archives/81975

and with @jsealab.bsky.social published translations of Arnon Nampa
seasia.wisc.edu/wp-content/u...

Both are well worth a read

This development is alarming. The app can automatically log in on behalf of students, potentially posing a serious risk to personal and university data security if they surrender passwords and other credentials to an AI company which is in no way an education provider, period.

The Age of Academic Slop is Upon Us what happens when AI automates "normal science"?

I just finished a three-year term as an editor at an international relations journal. I began at the start of the LLM era but ended right in the middle of it. Our volume of submissions tripled and our desk reject rate rose to 75%. I have some thoughts.
open.substack.com/pub/hegemon/...

‘Don’t cause trouble’: speculative governance, ward administration and fragmented sovereignty in urban Myanmar Speculative urbanism in the Global South has often been analysed through lenses of global capital and top-down state planning, with limited attention paid to how bureaucrats shape these dynamics fr...

You can check out my new study on speculative governance in #Myanmar for free right now at Third World Quarterly: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FJYER... 4/4

My new article argues this constitutes 'speculative governance': a mode of rule in which uncertain futures are used to govern land and people. The ‘don’t cause trouble’ motto reflects a politics of invisibility through which land speculation, local authority, and slow displacement are sustained. 3/4

This let them govern the property market. Untitled plots were traded informally. Elders verified ownership, witnessed transactions, and discouraged residents from obtaining formal titles. Authority was exercised not through law, but via everyday administrative work and management of uncertainty. 2/4

New study: On #Myanmar’s urban outskirts, ward administrators often told me they had one job—‘Don’t cause trouble.’ They certainly weren’t talking about following the law, though. They meant: don’t attract attention, trigger inspections, or make the ward visible to higher authorities. 1/4

Revising a manuscript is realizing that parts of it work and parts don’t yet, and being very grateful a reviewer caught the obvious oversights before production.

An observation on how #AI is shaping student work: almost none of my students this year included page numbers when citing books or articles in their final essays. Despite repeated reminders, page numbers seem to be disappearing. A troubling shift in how students now engage with reading materials.

Reclaiming the Future: Waiting, Resistance, and Expectations in Myanmar’s Post-Coup University Boycotts University boycotts have been used by students to champion change and challenge oppressive systems around the world. This article focuses on the boycotts carried out by university students in Myanm...

I have an article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia on the nationwide university boycott in #Myanmar after the 2021 coup. Drawing on literature on youth and waiting, I explore how students spend their time while rejecting military-controlled education. Free copy here: tinyurl.com/3wmkff3x

In my old apartment in Hong Kong, there weren’t any smoke detectors on any floor. I wanted to install one in my corridor at my own expense, but the management told me I wasn’t allowed to.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Urgent help needed: how do I turn off the #Copilot feature in MS 365? After restarting my Mac yesterday, the Copilot icon now shows up in Word (bottom right + Home panel). I don’t want it and can’t find any setting to disable it.

Small-scale land speculation on Mandalay’s outskirts reveals how everyday actors—not just developers—reshape peri-urban space and contribute to displacement in the global South.

By Francesca Chiu

📖 www.ijurr.org/article/beyo...

The team will play their semi-final today at 6 PM (HK time) against a team they’ve lost to before.
If you’re in town, there’s a free TV broadcast to support them! #NationalGames 8/8

Right now, the criteria have mostly relied on performance--basically, medals. But how can a sport win medals if it never gets the support to grow in the first place? It’s the classic chicken-and-egg question all over again. 7/8

It’s always moving to see an underdog story like this, but it also exposes a deeper question: what criteria do we use to decide which sports deserve support? Who gets to define what counts as “elite”? 6/8

The HK team is amateur, while most other provincial and city teams in the National Games are professional, with full-time players and strong backing. In Ming Pao Weekly, the head coach said: “The better the team does, the more it shows how much the players have sacrificed.” 5/8

There are 16 players in the HK handball team. 15 of them have quit their jobs or taken unpaid leave to prepare for the National Games. And yet, this amateur team has just made history by reaching the semi-finals of the 2025 National Games yesterday. 4/8

There are currently 39 elite sports , and handball is not one of them. That means the HK handball team receives no sports or financial support from HKSI. No access to HKSI gym rooms, no free meals, no physio support. They only get a small government subsidy about USD 400 per month per player. 3/8

We interviewed a number of major sports associations in town, and one strong impression stayed with me — the growing gap between “elite” and “non-elite” sports in HK. “Elite sports” are divided into Tier A and B, both supported by the Hong Kong Sports Institute(HKSI), the official training body. 2/8

The 2025 National Games are happening and #HongKong is hosting a number of events including #handball. This brought to mind a research project I worked on before my PhD. The project was about electoral representation in the sports and arts functional constituency: doi.org/10.1080/2327... 1/8

My article on land speculation in #Myanmar is featured in the latest @ijurresearch.bsky.social. I show how even without developer mega-projects or evictions, small-scale speculation in Mandalay still leads to urban displacement and inequality. Open access: tinyurl.com/24z2yr48