This article shows how universities can quietly restrict speech on controversial topics like Palestine by using bureaucratic rules such as safety protocols not originally meant for censorship. These hidden barriers, which we call “trapdoors,” limit academic freedom without open debate. We draw on real examples and interviews to show how this silencing works, why it matters, and how it threatens democracy.

Drawing on almost 17 years of research and teaching experience in geography and planning at the University of Luxembourg, this intervention reflects on the importance of engaging with professional practice. However, encounters with practice have become conflicted over the years. As the title suggests, responding with silence and ignorance does not constitute policing. Nevertheless, such a political culture can prevent a publicly funded institution from fulfilling its core missions.

In light of recent developments in space exploration, this intervention engages with the relations between the planetary and the extra-planetary. Advocating for the explicit consideration of the latter in critical planetary thinking, the extra-planetary is conceptualised as imagined-and-real counter-space. As such, it is literally not for humans and certainly not for the very frontier expansionist and extractivist practices that have contributed to the socio-ecological crises on planet Earth.

This intervention examines the fraught relationship between precarious early-career researchers (ECRs) and "slow scholarship" in the neoliberal academy, based on my reflections as a Swiss-based ECR. While ERCs aspire to "slow down" and conduct more caring research, we face pressures to "speed up" outputs in a competitive job market. Precarity unevenly impacts women and shapes personal decisions about the future. Navigating this requires collective efforts that are attuned to social difference.

Groundwater is key to the survival of people and ecosystems. Due to global change impacts, conflicts around groundwater thrive and knowledge gaps exist. In the assessment of five case studies we find that groundwater research is in tension between the rapid production of knowledge to solve existential crises and the slow production of knowledge to challenge injustices. Geographic research that combines different perspectives can play an important role in addressing this tension.