Category: PhD thesis

Two PhD packages to complete

Today was the end of term party in the political science department. I showed up in a suit in part to convey to any of my committee members present that I am focused on getting the dissertation done. *

I have promised my supervisor two big packages of work.

First — The output from the process of digitizing interview notes and coding them in NVivo. This will take a lot more tedious data entry, but this is the main empirical contribution of the project and will be the basis for the analysis.

Second — Drafts of the four thematic chapters, on political opportunity, repertoires, mobilizing structures, and framing. This is where three things come together: my experience with the climate activist and divestment movements, the theoretical framework of contentious politics (where the chapter labels come from), and the specific information I have collected from research subjects.

I’m not going to estimate when these packages will be done, but by that point most of the labour required for the PhD will be complete. I will need to incorporate and respond to comments from my committee, as well as write an introduction and conclusion, but the core of the dissertation will be in place.

* Part of me rebels at the idea that people will use information about how you appear in front of them to judge something essentially unrelated (the progress of a writing project), but an error of mine demonstrates how thoroughly our reasoning depends on present sensory inputs, even when seeking to approach a situation rationally. At the gathering, I spoke at length with a woman who I assumed was a PhD student, given her appearance, and given that with 200 students in the program at once there are many who I don’t know. Only just now, scrolling down the faculty directory to find the name of someone else, I went past the photo I took of the woman. At that photo session which I did for the department, I asked her at the outset if she was a PhD student and now remember being told she was faculty. Beyond a vague familiarity, I had no memory of her during the party, and only remembered the photo session meeting when prompted by a random external input.

April

I have one last blast of grading for my current TA contract: then I have dedicated the summer to completing my dissertation, getting chapters to committee members, implementing their proposed changes, and getting it defended as soon as possible.

I’ll be trying to write every day at home, starting with the completion of data analysis.

Middlebury fossil fuel divesment

At the end of January, Middlebury College (home institution of 350.org founder Bill McKibben) committed to fossil fuel divestment as part of a four-part response to climate change.

As far as I know, this is the first university which had formally said no to a divestment campaign and has since been brought around to saying yes.

Today Laurie Patton, the President of the college, published an editorial in Inside Higher Ed: Every Campus Should Address Climate Risk.

Louis Sobol on divestment at Mount Allison

Louis Sobol recently wrote a piece in the National Observer about university divestment organizing in New Brunswick: Lessons from campaigning for divestment at Mount Allison University.

It covers some themes of the movement: the sense of ecological threat motivating people to take action, the dominant perspectives within the movement about intersectionality and progressive allyship, an explanation of the objective of stripping fossil fuel companies of social license, a description of a range of tactics used by campaign organizers, and frustration with the university’s response.

Presenting at Power Shift

I am preparing to present a preliminary version of my research results at the Power Shift conference in Ottawa, which takes place from February 14th to 18th.

It’s an unusual venue for presenting academic research. The website says that it will “convene hundreds of young people from across this land to build a powerful and intersectional youth climate justice movement”. This speaks to both unusual features, including an audience comprised of young activists who in the case of my workshop will likely be divestment veterans, and a commitment to be intersectional and emphasize “climate justice”.

In my interviews I have made a particular effort to elicit the views of subjects on questions about which alliances the climate change activist movement should make and why. It’s not a natural match with my research — or with an analytical approach generally — to endorse or criticize particular approaches to allyship. Rather, I am trying to explain descriptively what people believe and what seems to have led to the development and reinforcement of those beliefs. To some extent, I am also trying to comment on what effects those views may have in the future.

Trying to come at the problem in a relatively disinterested way may be unfamiliar to many of the participants. It’s certainly at odds with a lot of the program, which seems to understandably emphasize energizing and exciting people over asking them to think over the strategies they have been using. Nonetheless, I think we’ll have an interesting and respectful discussion. It’s pretty easy to explain at the outset the logic for not assuming our current approach is correct, and being willing to consider deficiencies or limitations it may have. Maintaining morale and a sense that people have done good work is important, but surely actually doing good work must take precedence when the fate of the planet is at stake. It can be very comforting and motivating to see the movement you’re in as already in possession of all the answers and just needing to spread the word to everyone to succeed. Thinking critically about the real barriers to implementing a decarbonization project globally may require more unfamiliar thoughts and company, but there’s a strong case that it’s necessary.

Gearing up for school to resume

I didn’t go anywhere over the break, aside from a one night Christmas bus trip to Hamilton, because I wanted to use the time to advance my dissertation project. Important progress has been made on that front, with my committee now in agreement about what the chapters should be, which questions each should seek to answer, what my hypotheses are, and what evidence supports them. I wish I had gotten more done in terms of booking more interviews and transcribing handwritten notes from the ones that already happened, but at least with only one TA position this term I will have more time to devote to those tasks.

I have a stack of exams to grade before the term begins, which will have to be a big focus during the next few days, as distasteful and tedious an activity as it always is.

I’m excited that I’ve been given permission to audit Professor Diana Fu’s “Contentious Politics and Social Movements” course. That’s the main scholarly literature I am drawing upon in my analysis of the campus fossil fuel divestment movement in Canada so it will be great to learn more about it from an expert, go through some important readings on the subject, and discuss it all with some fellow students.

How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?

I have reached the stage in the dissertation process where I am setting aside 146 draft pages which are comprehensible to me but not so much to others and which are written more in blocks than in smoothly-flowing chapters and starting over to write something that will be markedly better.

Target defence and completion date: August 2019.

Working through and thinking beyond the PhD

Lots on the go — I’ve had a sudden flurry of late year photo bookings, including a three day Canada-UK artificial intelligence conference at the Munk School.

I’m still working on the dissertation of course, continuing with interviews and the literature review while working with my committee to structure the final document.

I’ll be doing less TA work next term to free up time to finish the dissertation.

There’s certainly a lot that’s interesting happening in climate politics. The little-reported but somewhat tactically novel Extinction Rebellion in the UK; UN climate talks in Poland’s coal region; and Alberta getting bitumen sands producers to voluntarily cut back on production to try to raise prices. We’re still nowhere near a politics that integrates the risks arising from unmitigated climate change, or capable of driving emissions reductions fast enough to make something like a 1.5 ˚C or 2 ˚C ceiling remotely possible.

I’m starting to think ahead to work beyond the PhD. During my MPhil I came to understand that climate change is the defining political and civilizational fact of our era. I went to work for the government in hope that I could do some good, but realized that under the leadership of parties like Canada’s Conservatives and Liberals it’s not possible to do the right thing as a civil servant since, for all their platitudes, their policy choices show that they aren’t serious about preventing the worst effects of climate change. I chose to do the PhD because I thought the degree would be useful and that it would provide a freer platform for climate change activism, as it did with the founding of Toronto350.org and the organization of the fossil fuel divestment campaign at U of T.

I really don’t know what’s the best place to go next. It’s hard to judge who is really being effective in changing political conditions to make rapid and effective climate change action possible. It’s possible 350.org’s focus on 100% renewables and alliances with other progressive movements will be fruitful, but it also seems possible that they are making choices that will limit the political constituency they can appeal to. Many activist organizations seem at risk of over-reaching, choosing approaches which appeal to their staffers who are already personally committed to decarbonization, sometimes choosing tactics based on what’s emotionally satisfying rather than what’s part of a strategic plan leading to success. That said, I am ever mindful of the limits of my understanding and ability to foresee what will work. There’s no sense in dismissing emotions as a factor in political change, since our real problem is lack of sufficient motivation and motivation is ultimately emotionally driven.

Eroded energy reserves

I’m flagging a bit from trying to keep up with dissertation work while also teaching sets of tutorials for two courses along with their associated exam and assignment grading.

It certainly doesn’t help that the third and fourth of the multi-month-long incredibly noisy outdoor renovations in adjacent houses are both in their noisiest phase, with power saws cutting through metal, sledgehammering through apart concrete blocks, and vehicle klaxons from early morning until past dark each day.

De-anonymization

De-anonymization is an important topic for anyone working with sensitive data, whether in the context of academic research, IT system design, or otherwise.

I remember a talk during a Massey Grand Rounds panel where a medical researcher explained how she could pick herself out from an ‘anonymous’ database of Ontarians, on the basis that her salary was public as an exact dollar figure, only people with her specific job had it, and she was the only woman in that position.

The more general idea is that by putting pieces together you may be able to identify somebody who someone else has made some effort to keep anonymous.

It’s a challenge when doing academic research and writing on social movements, when some subjects choose to be anonymous in publications. That means not just not sharing their name, but not sharing any information that could be used to identify them. That gets hard when you think about adversaries who might have access to other information (in an extreme case, governments with access to masses of information) or even just ordinary people who can combine information from multiple sources logically. The date of an event described in an anonymous quote might tell allow someone to look up where it happened online. Another quote in which a third party’s actions are described could be used to determine that the de-anonymization target wasn’t that person. And so on and on like the logical games on the LSAT or the intricacies of mole hunting.

Lee Ann Fujii wrote smart stuff about this, and about subject protection in research generally.