iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

New article! @giuliadalmaso.bsky.social, Laura Quinteros and I on experiments with ‘green fintech’, and what they tell us about green finance as a form of fictitious capital. Just out in @antipodeonline.bsky.social. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

New article! On the echoes between projects of 'financial inclusion' and colonial statecraft. Just out in @ripejournal.bsky.social, in an incredible SI on raced finance ed. by @iliasalami.bsky.social, @vincentguermond.bsky.social and @alibhagat.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Enough ‘now is the time of monsters’, in with ‘widespread participation in financial markets compels contradictory state action to backstop financial markets’ Gramsci.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

And finally, I write about how the specific modes of exploitation prevalent in the production of colonial export crops have shaped the uneven distribution and form of exposure to climate hazards, using examples from Senegal and Ghana. 12/ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Shae Frydenlund writes about the 'dialectical disposability' of Rohingya refugees in Kuala Lampur. Exploring the uneven temporalities through which refugees' labour is exploited helps grasp the complex 'modes of existence' of relative surplus populations. 10/ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Ben Selwyn with a really useful conceptual provocation about capital's 'conjoined appropriation' of labour and nature, in and through the operation of capitalist value chains. 9/ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Bridget Kenny has contributed an awesome piece on logistics in Gauteng, South Africa. She shows how the remaking of labour processes to capture value in the process of circulation has re-articulated old racial hierarchies and transformed urban space. 8/ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Out now! I've edited a special issue of New Political Economy on 'Centring exploitation in global political economy'. Link to the intro: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Other articles (all brilliant!) and a short summary 👇 1/

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Levels of financial engineering going on in municipalities which would give Floridan mortgage markets circa 2006 a run for their money:

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Along with all the obvious ways this is stupid, it’s bothering me that the guys having lunch on the steel beam in the original photo were decidedly not the ‘architects’. It’s all very ‘bourgeois pretense of doing labour’…

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

What kind of a fucking statement is this. ‘Some people move across borders because they want a better life’, but that’s meant to be the scary thing we need to watch out for?

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Probably as good a time as any for Sivanandan on the British state's contortions around immigration. journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10....

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Really enjoyed this book! Raises a whole bunch of really vital questions about power and transition, and does so much to get us beyond a rote insistence on state action in climate politics.

Picture of Heron et al, Radical Abundance: How to win a green democratic future.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

This kind of half-hopeful take hoping that some imminent Chinese hegemony will save us from climate breakdown is grimly fascinating.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

Giving up my principled refusal to take ideas about ‘neo-/techno-feudalism’ seriously and giving this a (skeptical) read:

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

The word ‘despite’ is doing an incredible amount of work here. How else *would* an asylum hotel provider make a £180m profit? This is exactly the ‘efficiency’ the private sector offers…

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 06/10/2025

Exciting new arrival on my pile of books I don’t know when I’ll get to read now that term has started!

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

Ethically investing in weapons manufacturing. on.ft.com/3WeZY9T

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

Have just started this. It’s really brilliant.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

Just bleak as hell that doing peer reviews apparently now includes ticking this box...

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Free books! For reasons too complicated to explain I now have multiple copies of all of the books 👇… if you’re fairly local (ie. in the UK) and would like any/all of them please let me know…

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

Another SI article now out! Bridget Kenny looks at emerging forms of exploitation linked to the rise of logistics and e-commerce in Gauteng, showing how these ‘adapt and reproduce’ historic racial hierarchies. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Another SI contribution now out! Ben Selwyn on capital's appropriation of the living world, through the conjoined exploitation of labour and extraction of nature, exacerbated through the restructuring of global production around capitalist value chains. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

New article! In this extended introduction to an imminent SI, I argue for renewed engagement with key Marxist debates about exploitation as a way of understanding the mutations of contemporary global capitalism. Now out in @NPEjournal! (Open Access) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

Really excited for this collection! On renewing Marxist debates about exploitation as a lens on the transformations of contemporary capitalism. Coming soon...

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

The Economist joining Larry Summers in noticing that mobilizing private capital isn’t working…

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

‘AI is inevitable; we need to teach students how to use it’. Also, unrelatedly, ChatGPT can’t afford for you to say ‘please’.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Strongly suspect that ChatGPT has written most of the statement we've just been sent from my employer's 'Chief Information and Transformation Officer' on AI in education...

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

In honour of Larry Fink reviving the 'democratization of investment' bit, I'm posting one of my favourite bits of delirious Marxology, from Robert Shiller's writing about the democratization of finance...

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Textbook demonstration from the Economist of the uncomfortably thin line between liberalism and fascism…

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Really enjoyed this one. Despite the slight red herring ‘age of genomic capital’ bit in the title, it does a really nice job of historicizing a lot of biotech solutionism.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Just got a surprisingly big (i.e., not 0) royalty statement from Taylor & Francis. My book sold a total of 6 copies last year (for which I earn GBP 1.48). The rest comes from what the statement calls 'Electronic data licensing'. Which led me to this horror: taylorandfrancis.com/contact/righ...

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

Really looking forward to this! (Also, pleasantly surprised that it’s quite hefty)

Titans of industrial agriculture by Jennifer Clapp

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

4) The headline figure of '90%' is somewhat alarmist -- somewhere halfway down there's a more detailed breakdown of what students are actually using AI for.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

2) Universities UK is the single most useless organization on the planet. What the fuck is this:

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Much wishful thinking, through which the basic facts that bond markets don’t mind a little fascism and that monetary and financial hierarchies mean that the costs of ‘uncertainty’ are borne at the peripheries poke through.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Europe being restored to its normal world historical place: doing late development by blatantly ripping off Chinese technology

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

The word ‘voluntarily’ is not meant to take this kind of strain.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Really sad to hear about Michael Burowoy. I’ve been teaching with his work on migrant labour for years. Always one of my favourite lessons, despite being a very old piece it rarely fails to challenge students (and, well, me) and reframe the ways we think about migration, work and borders.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

This introduction comes *so close* to getting it, and then swerves into 'what we need is a new new asset class... introducing: resilience credits!'

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

I have just learned that 'resilience credits' are apparently a thing (unironically described as 'a new asset class'). I suppose this is the kind of thing I should no longer be surprised by. ndcpartnership.org/sites/defaul...

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

FCDO now has a service that provides advice to businesses on how to list on stock exchanges. As far as I can tell, that’s what’s new.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

Started reading this, wondering ‘what about this is possibly new, they’ve been “switching from handing out foreign aid” for forty years”?’ The answer is impossibly stupid, even by the standards of private finance for development stuff…

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

It’s even wilder because they’re not even real ‘fines’ and private operators don’t actually have the power to enforce them!

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

Want to know what kind of assets 'private finance' wants to buy and what it wants to do with them? This chart is a pretty good summary.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

This is a remarkable text, where ‘can the core institution of the liberal international order (credit rating agencies) survive Trump’ sits awkwardly with ‘hey maybe there’s a systematic inequality in the way countries are rated?’. Ending in the synthesis ‘our only hope is austerity for everyone’.

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Nick Bernards @nickbernards.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

The headline here is that Shell is by far the world’s largest user of carbon offsets, but it’s also worth underlining how much of the market rests on ‘nature restoration’ and ‘avoided deforestation’. The scale of land grabs represented here is incredible. www.ft.com/content/b604...

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