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Kai Bosworth

@kaibosworth.bsky.social
3K followers 991 following 892 posts

Author: Pipeline Populism (2022). also into subsurface protection, climate politics, affect, infrastructure, marxism. Geographer, International Studies, VCU.

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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
if you are at 4S in Toronto, say hi at the sessions we've organized on "Earth's Subsurface" -- running Thursday from 8am-1:30pm! My presentation is in the 10am session and concerns the work I've been doing on karst geologists and cavers.
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
i am finding this 4S program to be extremely difficult to navigate and parse
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
a wild/different version of this i experienced recently is that some guy uploaded a bunch of the songs from the fake indie rock band Low Shoulder in Jennifer's Body which now appear on all sorts of platforms under his name (and presumably revenue)
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Reposted by Kai Bosworth
NiCHE Canada @nichecanada.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Learn about @jeremyjschmidt.bsky.social's new book, Landlocked: Water, Energy, and Planetary Politics in Alberta ( @uchicagopress.bsky.social 2026). Schmidt outlines how Alberta uses geosciences and policy to legitimize extractive land use. niche-canada.org/2026/09/29/n... #envhist #cdnhist
niche-canada.org
New Book - Landlocked: Water, Energy, and Planetary Politics in Alberta
Alberta uses environmental knowledge, shifting watershed boundaries, and resource deals to secure political legitimacy and shape its extractive energy future.
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
someone needs to put together an aag cfp for me specifically, starting to get worried!
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
in 1861, groundwater was legally defined in an Ohio supreme court ruling as too “secret, occult and concealed” to regulate. the phrase is cited a lot but it is still cracking me up.
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I wonder what the AAG numbers will be like this year. feels like I'm seeing fewer CFPs than ever. conference cost, travel inflation, lack of funding, climate, trump regime, etc all probably part of things...plus, the earlier date this year.
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
low quality but if can you believe it: "Fume ventilation system installed by EPA on a home. The pipe extends into a crevice which connects to a cave under the house. The hole in the foreground, used for waste disposal, was actually the entrance to a cave extended under the house."
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
classic comment from oil companies doing CCS, too. "it's not new technology!"
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
I think one of the things they don't tell you about ethnographic writing is how small it feels. like I just have accumulated soooo many stories about caving by now. and I'll never write them up because they're just silly, or irrelevant, or would take too much time to tell.
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
blue book test where one of the questions is "what is something you've learned in this course this semester? be serious"
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
is hyperpolitics the academic way of saying "woke 1 was crazyyy"?
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
how many concord grapes can one man eat
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
"Indiana Jones and the Temple of Fumes." this image better meet the dpi and legibility requirements to be reprinted
Cover of The Green River Review #3 June 1985, the Green River Grotto’s newsletter. A sketched image of Lost River Caverns is behind a movie-like title which reads “First there was Raiders of the Lost Karst. Now – E.P.A. Productions presents Indiana Jones and the Temple of Fumes.”
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
i asked google for a pdf of a document i need and it generated a pdf of its AI response lol
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Reposted by Kai Bosworth
ali alkhatib @ali-alkhatib.com · 15/09/2026
this episode is really really really interesting, and (almost uncannily) prescient timing for me right now
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
the first caving club in the US (the DC grotto) evolved out of a hiking club associated with a local unitarian church an interesting fact that I don't quite know what to do with.
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
almost done w third chapter
Passageway: Cavers, cave conservation, and the danger of “getting political” 
Let’s go underground
An (environmental) history of labyrinths 
Cave huggers versus oil and gas
Don’t get political
Conclusion
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
any geographers out there working on "the pre-political"?
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
"Minnesotarized" is a new one
Mr. VENTO . We are pleased to welcome Mr. John B. Gustavson . I think I Minnesotarized your name with an F, but I have corrected it now .
Mr. GUSTAVSON . You were close , Mr. Chairman .
Mr. VENTO . Welcome
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I went on the Turbulence Pod with Dylan Saba. We're talking about what we can learn from data center populism, my incessant attempts to periodize climate politics in the 2010s, and my favorite Lefebvre quote. turbulencepod.substack.com/p/episode-40...
turbulencepod.substack.com
Episode 40: Counter-Space and the Data Center Revolt w/ Kai Bosworth
With Kai Bosworth
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I went on the Turbulence Pod with Dylan Saba. We're talking about what we can learn from data center populism, my incessant attempts to periodize climate politics in the 2010s, and my favorite Lefebvre quote. turbulencepod.substack.com/p/episode-40...
turbulencepod.substack.com
Episode 40: Counter-Space and the Data Center Revolt w/ Kai Bosworth
With Kai Bosworth
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
I have so many depressing fiction books that I want to read in the fall and winter. but it will keep being 80-90 degrees here for another two months
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Ash Daibach @whimberry.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
This is really interesting. @kaibosworth.bsky.social looks back over the climate struggles of the 2010s US and asks where the rebellions against data centres could lead. www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/...
versobooks.com
Where is the U.S. climate movement?
In the United States, there is a pervasive sense that the once-ascendent climate movement is in disarray or has even disappeared. The prior decade saw the actions and ambitions of climate activism bec...
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Reposted by Kai Bosworth
Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
"Instead of a politics hoping & waiting for the university to “get it right,” we may have to accept that this will never be the case & that our responsibility is to build toward the world we want & need by variably working with, against, & despite official university initiatives"
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Mollie Holmberg @octoqueenphd.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
New pub with @antipodeonline.bsky.social out today! On how emerging disease science makes human and geographic difference sound natural through stories about risky wildlife contact that leave out political and economic context. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Fixing Epidemic Risk, Fixing Epidemic Spacetime? How Emerging Disease Science Writes Wild Stories About Pandemic Origins
Using the US Agency for International Development (USAID) PREDICT program as a case study, I argue that mainstream emerging disease science (re)produces Orientalist imaginaries of pandemic risk throu...
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
🚨New article 🚨 Jesse Goldstein, Ben Haskett, Caroline May, and I mobilize "critical university studies" to investigate how "sustainability" is used as a pseudo-activity. we argue higher ed depoliticizes and partitions environmental and climate action. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Critical University Sustainability Studies: Evaluating <fc>STARS</fc> Reporting as Depoliticized Environmental Pseudo‐Activity
This article places university sustainability within broader literatures of critical and abolitionist university studies to understand how it depoliticizes environmental action and dispels more radic...
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Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Cool paper 👍 We argue similar: "Even though universities have been the fora where much of the vital knowledge warning us of avoidable disaster - & the massive injustices this entails - has been produced, there is little sign as yet of the transformational changes required in the HE sector"
frontiersin.org
Frontiers | “No research on a dead planet”: preserving the socio-ecological conditions for academia
Emergency declarations, most academics continue to operate according to 'businessas-usual'. However, such passivity increases the risk of climate impacts so ...
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Joseph Henderson @josephenderson.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
This is really great to see. We found something similar in our study of Canadian higher education policies: cjhe-rces.ca/index.php/cj...
cjhe-rces.ca
Climate Change and the Canadian Higher Education System: An Institutional Policy Analysis | Canadian Journal of Higher Education
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
🚨New article 🚨 Jesse Goldstein, Ben Haskett, Caroline May, and I mobilize "critical university studies" to investigate how "sustainability" is used as a pseudo-activity. we argue higher ed depoliticizes and partitions environmental and climate action. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Critical University Sustainability Studies: Evaluating <fc>STARS</fc> Reporting as Depoliticized Environmental Pseudo‐Activity
This article places university sustainability within broader literatures of critical and abolitionist university studies to understand how it depoliticizes environmental action and dispels more radic...
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
i got a jury duty summons while i am ON SABBATICAL and on a residency IN ANOTHER CITY which I applied for over a YEAR ago. if they don't let me off, I am going to blow a gasket.
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
note to self: look at conference registration fees BEFORE submitting an abstract
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
reading and writing today and tomorrow about Lechuguilla cave, and I'm running out of hyperbole to describe the speleothems. everything is really astonishing and bizarre. there are some pictures up here...presents the problem of how to alt-text them. lechuguilla-cave.info/photos/
lechuguilla-cave.info
Lechuguilla Cave info – The Photos
Portfolio of photos from ‘Lechuguilla Cave: Discoveries in a Hidden Splendor’ with images taken by the main cave photographers of the book project.
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
ILL rocks, can't believe I got this
Ground-water contamination by crude oil at the Bemidji, Minnesota, research site: U.S. Geological Survey toxic waste--ground-water contamination study : papers presented at the Toxic-Waste Technical Meeting, Tucson, Arizona, March 20-22, 1984
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Ranjani Srinivasan @rrr3006.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Last year we won divestment; now we are pushing for boycott! 🚨🚨AAG members-past, present, and future! Sign our GJP letter asking the AAG Council to put the boycott of complicit Israeli academic institutions to a membership vote. www.jotform.com/form/2622151...
jotform.com
Letter to AAG in support of a membership vote on boycott of Israeli academic institutions
Please click the link to complete this form.
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ali alkhatib @ali-alkhatib.com · 23/08/2026
still thinking about the bit at the end in particular, but it's super interesting
versobooks.com
Where is the U.S. climate movement?
In the United States, there is a pervasive sense that the once-ascendent climate movement is in disarray or has even disappeared. The prior decade saw the actions and ambitions of climate activism bec...
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
a whole 44 page PDF of political seed art from this year's minnesota state fair www.cropart.com/Resist.pdf
cropart.com
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
a most bizarre experience is running into a review written by someone you know IRL on goodreads (a hellish website I still use)
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
"A rare win in Indian country: how tribes drove out a mining company in one week At the sacred prairie of Pe’ Sla in South Dakota, Indigenous and environmental groups banded together to halt drilling" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
theguardian.com
A rare win in Indian country: how tribes drove out a mining company in one week
At the sacred prairie of Pe’ Sla in South Dakota, Indigenous and environmental groups banded together to halt drilling
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Alleen Brown @alleenbrown.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
100+ pages of WhatsApp chats & emails reveal the details of the propaganda effort waged by Energy Transfer's security contractor TigerSwan against the Indigenous led Standing Rock movement. 10 years later and new details continue to emerge www.hcn.org/issues/58-8/... w/ @drilledmedia.bsky.social
hcn.org
Inside Standing Rock’s propaganda war - High Country News
Standing Rock increased division in North Dakota between Indigenous communities and nearby non-Indigenous communities. Propaganda made it worse.
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
the hummingbirds are going loco fighting over honeysuckle
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
if I said "critique of Harvey on "militant particularism"", who comes to mind?
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Geographers for Justice in Palestine @geogboycott.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Building on successful pressure to bring our professional organization into compliance with the Divestment demands of BDS, we are asking Council to pass a motion putting the boycott of Israeli academic institutions complicit in genocide, occupation, and apartheid to a membership vote.
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Geographers for Justice in Palestine @geogboycott.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
AAG members -- please sign our letter to AAG Council in support of a membership vote on an academic boycott! www.jotform.com/form/2622151...
campaign update: urge aag council to let members vote on boycott! 

from geographers for justice in palestine
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Verso Books @versobooks.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Where is the U.S. climate movement? @kaibosworth.bsky.social on the U.S. climate movement's retreat and future prospects. www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/w...
versobooks.com
Where is the U.S. climate movement?
In the United States, there is a pervasive sense that the once-ascendent climate movement is in disarray or has even disappeared. The prior decade saw the actions and ambitions of climate activism bec...
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Reposted by Kai Bosworth
Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
new from me on the Verso blog: what happened to the U.S. climate movement? what can we learn from it's dissipation? and in a time of quietude, what can be gleaned from contrasts with the data center rebellion? www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/w...
versobooks.com
Where is the U.S. climate movement?
In the United States, there is a pervasive sense that the once-ascendent climate movement is in disarray or has even disappeared. The prior decade saw the actions and ambitions of climate activism bec...
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
new from me on the Verso blog: what happened to the U.S. climate movement? what can we learn from it's dissipation? and in a time of quietude, what can be gleaned from contrasts with the data center rebellion? www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/w...
versobooks.com
Where is the U.S. climate movement?
In the United States, there is a pervasive sense that the once-ascendent climate movement is in disarray or has even disappeared. The prior decade saw the actions and ambitions of climate activism bec...
14519
Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
other geographers, please weigh in!
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Kai Bosworth @kaibosworth.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
another chapter nearing completion
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Amy Westervelt @amywestervelt.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Excited to announce we've got a new @drilledmedia.bsky.social miniseries coming in partnership with @highcountrynews.org! As the 10-year anniversary of #StandingRock hits, @alleenbrown.bsky.social brings us the inside story of Energy Transfer's propaganda: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...
podcasts.apple.com
Welcome to The Propagandist
Podcast Episode · Drilled · S16 Trailer · 2m
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