Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

A month in

Even before the grading starts, combining five tutorials a week of teaching with all of my dissertation work has been draining at times. I just got home from a long day, but before I can sleep I need to prepare my lesson plan for three tutorials tomorrow and my semi-structured interview questions for two new research subjects.

Independently, I was talking with a friend about our maladaptive tendency in personal social relations to focus excessively on things that have gone wrong and people who either don’t now or never did see us the way we would prefer to be seen. If there’s a range of feelings others can hold about us from -100 meaning absolute loathing to 100 meaning profound admiration and over-riding love, we overemphasize efforts to try to shift the people at -50 back toward the positive — ignoring how the world is full of people who are willing to start us at 0 with no learned skepticism about us.

School’s social side starting

Orientation week is a nice feature of being in school in September. I don’t really remember what happened at UBC / in the Foundations program / at Totem Park residence in 2001, but during my grad orientation at Oxford in 2005 I met my friend Margaret and in my earliest hours at Wadham College I met Nora and Kelly. At U of T so far I have mostly prioritized Massey College orientation events, since I became a junior fellow the same year I began my PhD. This year I have put a bit less emphasis on Massey (being off the JF list, I don’t get invited to most events anyway) and given more attention to the Department of Political Science.

Yesterday evening the department has its start of term party in the Faculty Club. It gave me a chance to ask Peter Russell about the BC Court of Appeals decision on the Trans Mountain pipeline. Firstly, he thought legislation to aid the pipeline’s approval was appropriate and likely, given the political circumstances of the Trudeau government. He clarified that in an ideal world people would share our green sensibilities and no new fossil fuel projects would be going forward, but you can’t get elected in Canada now with such a platform. Secondly, that led to a discussion of whether democracies are capable of solving climate change. It’s especially concerning when you get a radical answer from an 80+ year old emiritus faculty member, but his view was essentially “there are good reasons to think not, and a lot of political theorists and ecologists have gotten into why”.

After the official departmental do, a loose band of us walked a couple of kilometres to what turned out to be a highly interesting informal party associated with GASPS: the Graduate Association of Students of Political Science. I had some great conversations on everything from the world’s ongoing nuclear arms race to sampling methods in field research. Hopefully I will see some of the new people I met again. It’s a bit uncertain because there aren’t many places and circumstances that bring together a large share of U of T’s PhD students. People in the same classes and preparing for the same exams bond, as do people who always work in the same study space, but it’s quite possible to never develop social relations with the broader membership of MA and PhD students in politics.

OSAP and U of T in year seven

Since U of T has replaced the inadequate funding it issues in years 1–6 of the PhD with none at all it is causing new problems and reinforcing my determination to finish and defend my dissertation by September 2019.

First OSAP (the Ontario student loan program) told me I would get no fall payment because it was all being put toward my $9000 in tuition. Today, OSAP contacted me again to say my funding was rejected because U of T says I’m not registered. Digging through the U of T online portal, I found that they will only confirm my registration after I pay $2550.

That’s confusing since OSAP said it was already paying them, but this is probably just a case of two awkward bureaucracies failing to mesh. I made the minimum U of T payment, so hopefully they will tell OSAP to reconsider their rejection.

I don’t want to go through this again in 2019, so there is every reason to get through the literature review, data collection, writing up, editing, and defence expeditiously.

Data collection

This is my first intense batch of academic interviews, and I feel like they have been going remarkably smoothly. It has been pretty straightforward to start getting in touch with people, scheduling times, doing preparatory research, and then having conversations people about their experiences with divestment at Canadian universities. I don’t think it constitutes the inappropriate disclosure of any sensitive or privileged information to say that everybody who I have spoken to — during the preparatory work of consulting on the research design and ethics protocol as well as during these formal interviews — has been generous with their time and enthusiastic about helping to come up with a solid and wide-ranging academic analysis of the divestment movement, incorporating its numerous dimensions including those of activist organizations using social movement strategies to pursue policy goals not offered by existing political parties (in terms of aggressive decarbonization) and those of power structures, forms of decision making, and the individual experiences of all those who have been involved. Not that I am doing all that myself! Through the process of researching campaigns I am also coming into contact with scholarly work that emphasizes dimensions of the campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) movement that my research doesn’t seek to investigate.

I’m really glad to have applied a lesson learned from my somewhat soupy theoretical project of an MPhil thesis. Coming at some subject which very smart people have thought about for decades and hoping to make a contribution just by reading the work and thinking is perhaps a bit over-ambitious, at least for me. And there is undeniable value in a research object which involves some direct empirical effort: the generation or recording of some unique data set that would not otherwise have existed, and which has some value for better understanding how the world functions politically.

Dissertation boot camp day 3

The three days of dissertation boot camp, organized by the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication, have been highly productive for me. While the advice was good, I could personally have done without the short instructional segments on things like goal setting and editing. What was extremely useful was the structure: sitting in a room with twenty or so other people for seven hours a day, minus lunch, and having fewer of the distractions than arise when working alone or even with a friend.

On the first day I largely focused on taking things I had sketched out in point form and converting them into paragraphs in my draft thesis chapters. I did more of that in days two and three, but ended up concentrating more on my ongoing census of all Canadian divestment campaigns, hoping to identify some participants from each to interview and who could help me find other organizers. I went through my whole list of Canadian universities and sent dozens of emails, actually scheduling at least a couple of interviews. I also added a lot to my big spreadsheets: one to characterize each identifiable Canadian campaign, a universal timeline with important events from each, a survey on the extant literature on campus fossil fuel divestment, and an index of standard types of documents produced by many campaigns like briefs and committee reports.

The experience has demonstrated that being well rested is not a requirement for getting research done, since both the early morning start (by my standards) and ongoing personal stress left me pretty much exhausted the whole time. There’s strength to be drawn, I suppose, from making material progress toward a self-identified goal. I don’t want this thing to stretch into an eighth year beyond September 2019, requiring me to pay more tuition and delaying the transition back into doing productive non-academic work (and having an income where the slow breakdown of all my equipment, clothes, and general belongings is to be expected).

Certainly in some ways the project isn’t going as I most optimistically hoped — particularly in terms of being able to easily get large numbers of interview subjects from each campaign in order to gain perspective on strategic decision making and disagreements — but it still seems like my broad research questions should be possible to answer using my methodology and the people and materials available. I’m also glad that I will have a reasonable amount of preliminary text to share with my committee members after academia’s standard August coma is shaken off.

Boot camp day 2

I spent much of today’s boot camp doing research online about Canadian university divestment campaigns and trying to contact people who have been involved.

Even though all the campaigns have happened since 2012, there’s a lot that has clearly already disappeared from the internet, though some of the websites established by campaigns remain in the Wayback Machine. There also seem to be some campaigns that never progressed beyond a petition on gofossilfree.org which a single person could set up in a few minutes. Helpfully the site lets you try to contact the person who set up the petition, but I don’t think I have gotten any responses so far from any campaigns that don’t offer more substantive evidence like a Facebook page or a media report.

I had hoped it would be possible to interview a fairly large number of people from each campaign, both to help develop a detailed timeline and to get into my core research questions about the effect the experience had on people. That may yet prove true for some campaigns – especially large ones that happened fairly recently – but my hopes of being able to get in touch with one or two people from each campaign and then easily reach a large group of others seem unlikely at this point to be fulfilled.

The early mornings of the dissertation boot camp have been a bit disruptive, especially alongside rather disrupted sleep. A friend of mine who I worry about often has been incommunicado for an unusual length of time, to which my brain naturally responds with a lot of directionless worry and speculation. There’s also another situation where I thought two friends were being treated badly by a third person, but it seems that despite being essentially vetoed my effort to encourage a change of behaviour has just left all three of them upset with me.

On the plus side, it seems like we have found someone to take over the room from our housemate who is moving out.

Boot camp day 1

I’m at my first day of a three day “dissertation boot camp”. I’m working on adding to four chapters: my issue and literature context chapters and the ones I have started on repertoires of contention and political opportunities.

In the lead-up to starting my undergrad program I bought the only printer I have ever owned. I knew I wanted a PostScript-compatible black and white laser printer to be able to print off attractive essays and a deep discount on a large office-calibre machine tempted me into buying an enormous monster which was always hard to cram into residence rooms and which certainly didn’t accompany me to England, Ottawa, or Toronto. Since then I’ve done all my printing with machines belonging to other people, reasoning that it’s better to have someone else handle the maintenance and nice not to have another big whirring box taking up a corner of my room.

Now in the context of the dissertation and some other fairly ambitious writing projects I’m thinking about ordering a Brother HL-L6200DW printer. Several run-downs of well-regarded printers mention the model, for which a 12,000 page print cartridge is $167.86. It does look pretty large but, since my room isn’t in a house where playing music from the stereo often makes sense, I could sell or give that away to make space for it. That could be fitting in a couple of ways. Tristan actually picked out the stereo in Ottawa, as a possession suitable for somebody with a new and well-paying government job and a reasonably noisy one bedroom apartment to himself. A few days ago, he strongly endorsed Brother’s monochrome laser printers for reliability and affordability. Trying to live simply it makes sense to invest in things that you would use frequently and to remove things from your life which are used as rarely as my stereo, especially if those things are cluttering a significant amount of the space you have to work with.

After a summer of expenses and little earned income I am wary of adding even more to my recent set of alarming credit card bills, but everyone who I have spoken to so far sees a printer as a reasonable purchase for somebody in my position.

Closing days of August

I’ve been feeling with August loneliness I’ve noted before in the PhD program, but not as acutely as in some previous years. Certainly having the chance to visit Andrea and Mehrzad in Ottawa contributes to that, as does a general sense of progress with PhD research and even of an identifiable end to the doctorate.

Tomorrow through Thursday I have the dissertation boot camp. Then it’s really just another week before committee members will be accessible again, teaching obligations will resume, and there will hopefully be opportunities to meet some new people.

After many years in the Toad Lane vegan co-op, my friend Tristan is moving to Waterloo for a job. For me, his presence in Toronto has been one of its defining features, alongside that of many of my father’s family members. It’s the end of an era that stretches back before the start of my PhD or my move from Ottawa, and even my 25th birthday. I hope the new job will suit him well. Toronto will certainly be poorer in his absence, and it reduces the odds I will stay here once my doctorate is complete.