Category: PhD thesis

Concordia and UBC commit to full divestment

It complicates the process of completing my PhD dissertation, but there has been highly encouraging movement from administrations targeted by fossil fuel divestment campaigns. While McGill has again said no, Concordia and UBC have pledged to go beyond their prior partial commitments and entirely divest from fossil fuels:

The movement has generally had a hard time in Canada, perhaps because of the size and influence of the fossil fuel industry.

I’m working this week on finishing my NVivo coding of interviews, then moving on next week to finishing the literature review. Spending the rest of the month working on a finalized and complete manuscript, I will need to make sure to mention new developments without expressing false confidence about my ability to explain something which happened so recently and which I don’t have independent data about.

Refining

I have been productively refining the dissertation, adding to the precision and extent of its content. There is still NVivo analysis to be done and the iterative process of refining the manuscript with the committee, but all the indications so far are that the interviews I conducted provide useful information for what happened during these CFFD campaigns and what participation meant for many of those organizing them at the time. They may well disagree with some of my overall analyses about how to achieve decarbonization, but I have huge respect for their demonstrated success and passionate commitment. It’s the insuppressible youthful energy of this movement which has given it salience in the minds of university administrators and the media, through everything from dignified protests to rowdy chanting marches to informal discussions among faculty members about supporting an ongoing divestment campaign. People can see that young people now believe that their lives are at stake, and the feelings that raises are insuppressible.

14th university September starting

Given how much I have been thinking about ‘the summer’ as a unit, September might have been expected to arrive with a feeling like a sonic boom experienced from the ground or the tolling of an ancient clock bell.

The temporary life reorganization arising from my mother’s short visit blurred the transition, as I had set aside the regimen of PhD work which had become the skeleton for my life for three days anyhow.

I haven’t won any teaching assistant positions for now, so the thesis can continue as a pretty exclusive focus. I may try to get a 50-75 hour grading position in one of the later emergency rounds.

I am aiming to complete my data analysis as soon as possible, while working at a sustainable rate, and then moving on promptly from that to submitting a formal manuscript to my committee members for the largest substantive stage of their comments and review.

Back in August 2017 I said: “The aim now is to get ethical approval by October and finish writing and defending the dissertation by September 2019.” Given that there will be 3-4 months of time spent by the committee reviewing my manuscript while I work on other things, aiming to defend by the end of 2019 seems appropriate and plausible.

In the research

It’s 4:41am and I am in my 10 1/2th hour of thesis work since I last slept. For weeks I have been working my way through my notebooks, compiling interview reports based on my discussions with campus fossil fuel divestment organizers in Canada. I have been paying special attention to getting the details from this interview, reviewing more of the raw audio than normal. That’s because it seems like an especially valuable account which speaks informatively on many of my key research questions.

That is making me feel that despite all the frustrations and sacrifices which have been involved in the project, it has been worthwhile to seek these organizers out and get their direct accounts of what happened and what it meant to them. Even if the project ends up being of limited theoretical interest to academics, there is an undeniable empirical value about having collected this information while people still have fresh memories of their involvement. Similarly, even if activist readers of the dissertation find my analysis unconvincing, being exposed to these direct accounts will enrich their understanding of what happened, reinforcing some of what they already believed with new evidence and perhaps challenging some of what they believe by showing that people had other experiences and reactions.

I have 17 interview reports left to write. Then I will move on to coding their contents by theme, finishing my literature review, producing my first complete draft manuscript, and then beginning the process of review by committee members and making changes in response to their comments.

Focusing on interview reports

Now that my copy of NVivo has been delivered there is an extra impetus to finish converting my notes from the 62 interviews so far into text file interview reports which I can code using the software.

That will be my main focus until the whole set of interview reports is written. Then I can finish the coding and prepare the raw data package which was the first major thing promised to my supervisor.

How the oil industry sees the campus fossil fuel divestment movement

Fascinating what you can find online:

Canada’s Oil Sands: Connecting Energy Infrastructure with Core Values
Peter MacConnachie, Suncor Energy
PNWER Meeting, Big Sky

Note especially slide 16 and slide 20: the first is their breakdown of the “enemy naming” strategy which the CFFD movement has adopted to assert the moral complicity of the fossil fuel industry in climate change and other forms of damage, the second focuses on their main lines of counter-argument, that universities should focus on education instead of thinking about the effects of their investment choices, that unlike publicly traded companies state-owned oil firms which hold larger reserves cannot be pressured through divestment, plus a patronizing line about how people worried about climate change just don’t understand how the energy system works.

Academic productivity

Productivity in the context of academic research is an unusual phenomenon. While elements like data entry may have a pretty direct and straightforward relationship between effort and outcomes, coming up with new ideas and writing can both involve a lot of unpredictability and spontaneity. Academic productivity is also social, or at least networked. The extent to which your ideas will influence others does depend on their creativity and the success of their expression, but it also depends on fads within the discipline, including vogues among funding bodies and journals, and the willingness of senior scholars, the university, and the media to promote it.

It’s one of those cases where effort and results can be totally out of scale. You may produce something in an afternoon (it’s as true of an essay as for a song or a poem) which ends up promoting widespread discussion and being one of the things most commonly associated with you. Alternatively, you can “devote weeks of most intense application” to a project that never gets any attention or has any consequences. It’s a nice demonstration of how the products of our labour can often have little relation to how effortful the labour is, and how moments of insight which are both surprising and comprehensible to others can be the unpredictable products of random circumstances and unpredictable chains of inference.