About

Hello,

I’m an Australian/British academic living in Manchester Staffordshire UK (mostly).  I am interested in a bunch of things – technological change, social change (and lack of it), climate change (accelerating) and much else.  I write for The Conversation.  I’m interested in the mechanisms of inertia – how groups avoid making changes that would undercut the power of those in charge. That includes within social movement organisations, and my work on that invokes cheerful terms like ‘smugosphere‘, ‘ego-fodder‘ and ‘emotacycles‘, to list but a few of my neologisms.

I run a climate histories website called “All Our Yesterdays” – allouryesterdays.info

“Educated” in Australia, England, California, I’ve been an an aid worker, a teacher (sort of), cinema usher, telephone operator, health care professional etc. Currently a research associate at Keele University, research fellow at University of Sussex, unemployed, having completed my PhD at University of Manchester in 2019.  Extremely lucky to call this incredibly intelligent and talented woman “wifey”. Not the most popular guy you’ll ever meet, for various good and bad reasons.  So it goes.