Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

Defence booked

My PhD dissertation defence is booked for 2–4pm on December 2nd.

The defence is conducted by the examination committee, which consists of my PhD research committee plus an internal external examiner (from our department but not involved in my project) and external external examiner (from another university).

I will get a report from the external external a bit before the oral defence, and the most likely result of the proceedings is to be asked to make minor changes over a week.

In the interim, along with TA work, I will get ready for the final round of approval for use of direct quotes. To help people feel comfortable and protected during the interviews, I told people that they would get a chance to review direct quotes attributed to them prior to publication, with the option to have them included anonymously instead.

I will also prepare the LaTeX manuscript to print a couple of dozen copies at the Asquith Press at the Toronto Reference Library. I will give them to major supporters of the project, as well as Robarts Library and the U of T archives (as we did with the divestment brief).

I am also now giving serious thought to setting up a student coaching business. One-on-one guidance about planning and working through the term, as well as engaging with the countless enrichment opportunities at U of T that it is up to the student to go out and find, would provide something which is painfully absent at U of T. It would rely on skills which I already have from my own student and TA experience, and it would serve a need and a market which I know exists. It would also separate employment and my ability to pay rent, bills, and student loans from the politics of climate change within organizations. Instead of having to stress about finding an organization to work for where I endorse their strategy and they endorse my activist efforts, I could keep myself going with work that is independent of anybody else and devote the rest of my time to making a difference on climate change in areas I am good at (research and policy analysis) rather than those where I have little experience or skill (non-profit fundraising).

Teaching and writing

While my dissertation work is overwhelmingly done, the combination of residual writing up tasks and TA work is making this a pleasantly busy term and a reminder of Septembers past, including my own starts at UBC, Oxford, and U of T.

As of last night my dissertation is off to the external external examiner, whose six-week review is the last step before the defence: now expected in the last days of November or first days of December, right around my 39th birthday.

Writing advice for undergraduates (2014)

Fortunately, the conditions under which a TA will read your essay are much like those in which everything else you ever write will be read, from reports written for your future employer to love letters written to your future spouse. This means the skills required to write these papers are generally applicable in life. Especially with dealing with an inattentive reader who isn’t especially interested in your thoughts, a special effort must be made to put forward an argument that will lead the reader along while rewarding their attention. In every case, the reader will have other demands on their time and other things on their mind. Your purpose is to convey something convincing and scholarly under those conditions. Your two real tasks are to develop an argument and then to convey it in as clear a way as possible.

Essay writing tips for undergraduates (2013)

Quebec’s 2022 election and climate change

CBC News reports:

Legault’s growing number of supporters endorsed, instead, his politics of the status quo.

This is a politics of more tax cuts aimed at the broad middle class and of docile environmental policies, of investments in elder care and the odd quarrel with Ottawa.

…

But Québec Solidaire, the progressive party that had hoped to emerge as the alternative to the CAQ, vowing urgent action on climate change, only mustered 15 per cent of the vote on Monday. That’s about how it fared last time. It finished the race with 11 seats — one more than in 2018.

Princeton divesting

Princeton is not only divesting but ‘dissociating’ from fossil fuel corporations:

Divestment is a decision to refuse to invest in a company or set of companies and entails the sale of all securities associated with a company, including both direct and indirect investments, and precludes the repurchasing of those securities.

Dissociation means also refraining, to the greatest extent possible, from any relationships that involve a financial component with a particular company. It includes no longer soliciting or accepting gifts or grants from a company, purchasing the company’s products, or forming partnerships with the company that depend upon the exchange of money.

Every highly reputable school that acts makes it easier for others to say yes and harder to justify continued fossil fuel investment.

Satellite to satellite espionage and warfare

One inescapable but confounding element of trying to understand politics, international relations, and history up to the present day is that we don’t have access to what governments are doing in secret. We will need to re-write the history of these times decades from now, if circumstances and freedom of information laws permit historians to learn about the skullduggery of this era.

One potentially important example is happening now in space. Satellites have become crucial to everything from time synchronization for high precision activities to navigation and communication. They also can’t really be hidden. Perhaps there are satellites with optical stealth that are hardly or never visible, but even top secret spy satellites of the conventional design can have their orbits determined by civilians with stopwatches and binoculars.

That is why we know that Russia, among others, has been experimenting with satellites that approach others and can potentially disrupt or destroy them, or monitor their activity. An article on China’s program includes the intriguing phrasing: “non-cooperative robotic rendezvous” between spacecraft. Russia’s Cosmos 2542 is known to have approached USA 245: an American spy satellite believed to be one of the largest things in space.

One can only speculate on how such capabilities are influencing world politics and the unfolding of events.

COVID: fall 2022

Here we are:

And where we have been:

One data point to add to the galaxy thereof: at today’s science forum at Massey College, among the people sitting at the front the ones wearing masks along with me included the college’s chair of science and an Order of Canada-winning astrophysicist.