Author: Milan

To me, today’s qualitative methods lecture embodied much of what is frustrating and unattractive about academia. It’s the parochialism, the turf-wars, the egos, and the navel-gazing. It’s playing an intellectual game with your fellow practitioners, rather than focusing on some project with external value. That value needn’t be the improvement of the world, per se, but merely the achievement of something externally valuable, in a way that arguments that nobody outside the discipline cares about simply aren’t.

Perhaps it’s symptomatic of my lack of certainty about what the future holds that every reading and discussion becomes, at least partly, a study in what exactly I am going to do with myself. While there is appeal in doing a doctorate, it would involve dealing with a huge amount of the kinds of issues identified in the paragraph above. It also brings the question of where to do it: in the States, where the programs that are almost universally considered the best are located, or in Britain?

American international relations is quantitatively focused, aggressively realist, and fairly intellectually limited. There seems to be a very strong hegemonic sense not only of what the discipline is, but what different sub fields within it (like foreign policy analysis) are and what sort of people use them. That might be something of a caricature, but there does seem to be truth to the idea that studying international relations in the states means doing something quite specific, and something based on a methodology that I really don’t accept. I don’t see how stressing the ‘science’ in social science is a useful approach for IR. I think to do so is chasing the illusion of rigour, rather than getting the kind of theoretical grounding that you need to undertake the kind of projects that interest me.

The British option has problems of its own. Oxford D.Phils are very short programs: much shorter than PhDs in the United States. They do not involve gaining teaching experience, which would be important if I was later looking for an academic job in Canada. Altogether, there seems to be very little confidence in the value of doing a D.Phil among the members of the program whose opinions I respect most.

A third option is to do a doctorate in the United States in a field other than international relations. To do something more specific might allow me to escape the theoretical debates that are so abstract, tiresome, and generally inapplicable. This is a possibility I will definitely consider, once I begin applying to further graduate programs.

As I’ve said many times before, however, it seems sensible to do something non-academic during the inter-degree break. Two central planks of my plan for the next eight years are to see a large portion of the world – ideally though a non-touristic lens – and to write some kind of book. Both would be aided by the right kind of job: something international which involves travel and experiences of a kind I’ve not had. As I told Bryony this afternoon, finishing the M.Phil (and hopefully doing a good job of it) should be proof enough for the moment that I can handle the academic side of things. Afterwards, it seems wise to prove that about some other area. I don’t know what is involved in getting a job with the United Nations Environment Program or some NGO, but it’s another thing to investigate in the medium term.

In the short term, the need for a summer job and summer accommodation is becoming increasingly acute.

• I’ve been reading the Murakami book quite a bit in the past few days. As is often the case with novels, it is the voice of the narrator that sets the mood and, by extension, sets my mood when I am orbiting the book. I quite like the crisp descriptions – the personal narratives – that introduce the characters. I would be intrigued to meet myself in the form of such a description.
• The Sainsbury’s brand Isle of Bute Scottish Cheddar is quite delicious: a very sharp, white cheese – it reminds me a great deal of the Tilamook special white cheddar that I’ve traditionally bought during my family’s trips to Oregon.
• Mica has a new video online.
• At the moment, it seems like writing posts of the “here’s what I did today” variety is uninteresting and vain. I will try to be more substantive for the next while.

International Relations theory has a way of bringing out the passions in people. Roham, Sheena, Alex, Bryony, and the rest of my core seminar group had a particularly energetic discussion about liberal international relations theory today. The instructors were similarly engaged and, overall, it made for an interesting contrast with the relatively staid (though informative) character of our history seminar last term. These are the big questions that are coming up now. What is moral conduct for states? Does that question even mean anything? Can we build a better world and address the mistakes of the past? You cannot travel from across the world, at huge effort and expense, to study international relations, without caring deeply about these questions. To be in the position where people both have that level of interest and commitment and a high level of respect for one another is intellectually thrilling.

After a short nap to help combat electoral fatigue, I set about finishing my paper for Dr. Hurrell this afternoon. Now that Claire has taken a peek at the first draft, I should be able to hammer out a finalized version, with citations and all the rest, to be hand-delivered to Nuffield before my noon lecture tomorrow. Much as I would rather get to sleep, duty calls.

Of course, it wouldn’t be quite so late if I hadn’t spent at least an hour in Wellington Square introducing Claire to some of my favourite music. Of course, even the most basic of utilitarian calculations (probably the best I can manage) would demonstrate that the time was enormously better spent from a long-term perspective than devoting another hour to straightening out slightly kinked sentences or regenerating bodily tissues.

Seeing about 1000 visitors during the past 30 hours or so, on account of the election coverage that was here, has given me the slightest taste of mainstream blogging. While I don’t think I have the time, desire, or ability to write the kinds of blogs that tens of thousands of people stream through daily, I do like to write things of interest beyond the circle of my family and friends. Like privacy versus disclosure, it’s just one of those tensions that can’t be eliminated in this kind of writing.

• Potentially useful fact of the day: All my photos are calibrated to look best at 1.8 Standard Gamma and the D65 white point: equivalent to midday sunlight. If you’re using an Apple LCD monitor, these are the default settings.