Category: PhD thesis

NotebookLM on CFFD scholarship

I would have expected that by now someone would have written a comparative analysis on pieces of scholarly writing on the Canadian campus fossil fuel divestment movement: for instance, engaging with both Joe Curnow’s 2017 dissertation and mine from 2022.

So, I gave both public texts to NotebookLM to have it generate an audio overview. It wrongly assumes that Joe Curnow is a man throughout, and mangles the pronunciation of “Ilnyckyj” in a few different ways — but at least it acts like it has read about the texts and cares about their content.

It is certainly muddled in places (though perhaps in ways I have also seen in scholarly literature). For example, it treats the “enemy naming” strategy as something that arose through the functioning of CFFD campaigns, whereas it was really part of 350.org’s “campaign in a box” from the beginning.

This hints to me at how large language models are going to be transformative for writers. Finding an audience is hard, and finding an engaged audience willing to share their thoughts back is nigh-impossible, especially if you are dealing with scholarly texts hundreds of pages long. NotebookLM will happily read your whole blog and then have a conversation about your psychology and interpersonal style, or read an unfinished manuscript and provide detailed advice on how to move forward. The AI isn’t doing the writing, but providing a sort of sounding board which has never existed before: almost infinitely patient, and not inclined to make its comments all about its social relationship with the author.

I wonder what effect this sort of criticism will have on writing. Will it encourage people to hew more closely to the mainstream view, but providing a critique that comes from a general-purpose LLM? Or will it help people dig ever-deeper into a perspective that almost nobody shares, because the feedback comes from systems which are always artificially chirpy and positive, and because getting feedback this way removes real people from the process?

And, of course, what happens when the flawed output of these sorts of tools becomes public material that other tools are trained on?

Mobilizing structures in the UBC pro-Palestine encampment

Interesting from a social movement perspective:

The UBC encampment for Palestine has been going strong since April 29. Working as a horizontal organizational structure, the encampment is a leaderless, non-hierarchical space where everyone is equal. We have groups in charge of different tents related to the daily operation of the camp, including food, safety, supply, medicine, art, and library. General meetings are held as frequently as possible and are the only platform to decide the goals of the encampment. It is a process of direct democracy where everyone’s voice is heard and considered, with final decisions being made based on majority votes.

Everyone who shows up to this camp is intelligent, kind, and capable of doing great things, however, we are humans, and deep down, we all seek a sense of belonging. This whole encampment is like a community, and within it, each tent is part of the group. However, it did not always feel like a cohesive community. Before the camp reached this structure, it was run by multiple “invisible” hierarchies.

Initially, there were instances where outgoing white, cisgender, and conventionally-attractive men were automatically assumed to be smart, reliable, and worthy to make decisions, while non-conforming and marginalized individuals had to work harder to be acknowledged. I don’t think this was done purposely, but can be attributed to the mixture of pressure at the encampment and the unconscious biases ingrained in colonial ideologies. The constant struggle to have all our voices heard caused tension in the supposedly democratic structure, as well as relationship mistrust in the camp. This was not what I and a lot of comrades expected from this space, where solidarity with Palestinians against colonization demands democratic practice and decentralized decision-making.

As a young, gender-non-conforming person of color, my voice was often overshadowed in favour of white, cisgender campers. We took time to acknowledge and address these biases and hierarchical structures and we came up with alternative ways to ensure every voice was heard. I believe our camp is being managed in a more inclusive way, moving toward good causes, rather than replicating oppressive systems.

Personally, I think the progressive obsession with the identities of their messengers is counterproductive to effective political organizing. A person’s ideas are good or bad based on their content, not the demographic characteristics or group identity of the speaker. Viewing people as legitimate or illegitimate participants because of arbitrary features of their identity turns them from active thinking agents to mere group representatives. Also, this sort of privileging and de-privileging puts feelings of purity and moral superiority ahead of the question of whether the activism is having any broader societal effect.

Re-writing my dissertation as a popular book

Rather than for academics, my PhD dissertation was always intended more for activists, policy-makers, and concerned citizens.

Despite my efforts to make it accessible and limit jargon, however, it seems that a document in PhD dissertation format just won’t have that broad an audience. As such — once I have a job — I think I should re-write the argument as a book for a popular audience. That would expand the readership, and also let me write it the way I want and not to meet the requirements of academics.

I will be producing a new version of the dissertation with some minor corrections, but that too will have to wait until I am employed and able to pay my bills.

Sticky: My PhD dissertation

If you have been sympathetic to my cause and my suffering, my PhD dissertation is my most sincere, detailed, highly scrutinized, and high-effort way of explaining the climate change crisis which we are enduring and how to work toward a course of action to save us all. Reading it is the best thing you can do in response to observing how much difficulty and pain has been involved in creating it.

Please don’t assume it is written for academics and not for you. It is written for everyone who cares about the future of the world, and more than anything I want people to engage with it. Please also do not assume it’s written in impenetrable or obscure language; I wrote it to be comprehensible to anyone with a substantial and educated interest in climate change: among policy-makers, activists, environmentalists, journalists, and those merely morbidly concerned about the future of this sphere of Nickel-Iron we call The Earth:

Persuasion Strategies: Canadian Campus Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns and the Development of Activists, 2012–20

If reading the whole thing seems like too much, consider reading just the preface on positionality before chapter 1 for an explanation of how I am trying to engage with the climate change activist movement, along with section 5.5 (“Climate justice within the CFFD movement”, p. 190), section 5.6 (“Purity versus effectiveness”, p. 192), and section 5.7 (“Policy durability”, p. 201).

If you prefer a paper copy and will actually read it, contact me and I will send you one of the copies available at cost from Lulu.com.

DeSilva and Harvey-Sànchez divestment podcast series complete

The fifth and final episode in Amanda Harvey-Sànchez and Julia DeSilva’s series on the University of Toronto fossil fuel divestment campaign, successively organized by Toronto350.org, UofT 350.org, and then the Leap Manifesto and Divestment & Beyond groups.

The episode brings back guests from each prior era, and includes some interesting reflections on what organizers from different eras felt they learned, the value of protest as an empowerment space and venue for inter-activist networking, the origins of the Leap Manifesto group in the aftermath of the 2016 rejection, as well as how they explain President Gertler’s decision to reverse himself and divest five years after he rejected the Toronto350.org campus fossil fuel divestment campaign.

Threads on previous episodes:

Ongoing occupation demanding fossil fuel divestment at U of T’s Victoria University

Friday was day 12 of Climate Justice U of T’s occupation at Victoria University, pressuring them to divest from fossil fuels.

They have a guide online for people wishing to visit the occupation.

They also have a petition.

Awarded my dictionary

As distant and improbable as it seemed at times, at tonight’s Convocation High Table I was given the dictionary traditionally awarded by Massey College to PhD graduates:

Photo by Chantal Phillips

This was a much more meaningful graduation for me than attending a U of T ceremony would be, and hearing the biographies of all the graduating Junior Fellows was a reminder of how many critical fights humanity is engaged in right now, and how it will take the best from all of us to fight our way to a successful, liveable, humane future for the world.

Early tomorrow I am off for back-to-back-to-back trips: first to visit our dear friends in Ottawa; then for a couple of days of quiet and reading at a dairy farm in Cambridge, Ontario; and then straight out on my first camping trip in many years.

After that, my full-time job will become finding a new affordable place to live in Toronto. Finding inexpensive accommodation is actually more urgent and important than finding an OK job. Per George Monbiot’s tough but invaluable career advice, financial security really comes from minimizing your expenses, not maximizing your income. The cheaper you can live, the freer you are to work on what is important and bring everything you can to the fight.

Dissertation on TSpace

I am still trying to get them to replace the file with one that has a few minor typos corrected, but my dissertation went live on the University of Toronto’s TSpace platform today:

Persuasion Strategies: Canadian Campus Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns and the Development of Activists, 2012–20

Please don’t buy one before asking if I was planning to make you one already, but you can buy a print copy at cost from Lulu.com. I am also ordering a batch to reduce shipping costs, so if you want to get in on that let me know.