Category: PhD thesis

Media attention to the case for divestment

I was heartened yesterday to see the CBC publishing an article about one of the scholars behind the case for divestment which was made successfully at Cambridge: Academic from Saskatoon plays key role in Cambridge University divesting from fossil fuels.

The report they link — Divestment: Advantages and Disadvantages for the University of Cambridge by Ellen Quigley, Emily Bugden, and Anthony Odgers — is particularly notable for its inclusion of a broad range of scholarly work on divestment from a range of fields.

Belliveau on the CFFD movement

Having missed its importance after putting it on a to do list back in May 2019, I have printed off Emilia Belliveau’s 2018 master’s thesis from UVic about the fossil fuel divestment movement in Canada, and particularly how it has affected the movement’s organizers.

That’s my main research question as well, making it surprising that I didn’t see the extent of this document’s overlap until I rediscovered it.

I will have a few different responses in my dissertation once it is published, but it’s a relief to say that this document hasn’t called attention to anything massive which I have missed. Incorporating it, therefore, it mostly a matter of adding additional references in the lit review and footnotes.

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2020-08-31

At 2am on the 31st, we have reached the end of “the summer” and I have loosely defined it academically for many years now (school starts early in September, but never in August in my experience — I moved in at my Oxford college on September 23rd) and I feel better than OK about how the summer devoted to advancing the dissertation went. I had adopted for myself the rough metric that I wanted to have a draft of every chapter ready for Professor Vipond by the end of August. As it stands, he has the first four chapters, I have hand-edited the fifth and am preparing to review the relevant interview reports, and then I need to do the same for chapter 6 and finally do a language edit of the conclusion. The existing draft is already solid. Nobody would know to miss some of the specific empirical details I am pulling back in from the interviews in these drafts, and Professor Vipond already thinks the review of the literature is more than adequate in scope and depth. What I’m mostly doing in this round of edits is spotting everything which would singe the eye of a highly experienced reviewer, as it saves a lot of time across the whole project to anticipate and avoid a correction rather than be informed of the need for one and comply.

Four central chapters

I have discussed my introductory chapter with my supervisor, received comments, and incorporated them. Tomorrow, we are meeting about my literature review chapter.

At the same time, I am working on reading through blocks of my tag-sorted interview reports corresponding to the four central chapters of the dissertation:

  • Political opportunities — including the history of the fossil fuel divestment movement, the role of 350.org and the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition (CYCC) as brokers, and the way the movement has developed in Canada
  • Mobilizing structures — how campaigns organized themselves and made decisions, support from brokers and within universities, and the structure of efforts to resist divestment
  • Repertoires — what divestment campaigns actually did, including the enemy naming and story of self strategies, the spectrum from cooperative to contentious tactics, and the split between ‘outside game’ mass mobilization and ‘inside game’ negotiations with the administration. Also, the actions of divestment opponents and non-divestment actions taken by target universities
  • Framing — The worldview underlying fossil fuel divestment activism, particularly the strategic implications of intersectionality

I need to get all these drafts done ASAP so my committee members will have a chance to look at them before ordinary work resumes in September.

Insomnia and activist burnout

The most common physical health symptom described by the participants was chronic insomnia. Heidi explained: ‘One of the first indicators for me is insomnia. . . . I’m waking up in the middle of the night thinking about how I need to do this or bring this in or what time I am meeting with these parents, and that starts repeating itself.’ The insomnia became more serious for Cathy: ‘I would not be able to sleep unless I took sleeping pills.”

…

They described, not just brief periods of weariness, but chronic, debilitating stress, anxiety, and depression that drove them away from their activism at least temporarily. Christopher, for example, felt ‘frayed all over’. Evelyn described feeling ’emotionally devastated’.

Chen, Cher Weixia and Paul C. Gorski. “Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists: Symptoms, Causes and Implications.” Journal of Human Rights Practice, Volume 7, Issue 3, November 2015

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Institutional memory on fossil fuel divestment

One concern about the informal and non-hierarchical approach used in most campus fossil fuel divestment campaigns, and in the climate activist movement more broadly, is that it impairs institutional memory and thus prevents people from having a strong understanding of what has already been done and learned.

In an effective and intriguing effort to counter that concern the Fossil Free Macalester in Minnesota released a 29-page handbook: Handbook: Lessons from a Divestment Campaign.

It’s hosted on a Google Drive account (another challenge for institutional memory) but if that link breaks there is a backup on the Wayback Machine.

First thorough manuscript review

I am deviating somewhat from the planned timeline here, moving forward the first soft edit of the whole manuscript for coherence and structure to before finishing the literature review and incorporation of material from interviews.

In part, that’s just an effort to break out of a low productivity pattern of toiling at the same very long tasks over and over. More substantively, it seemed unanswerable that somebody ought to have read the whole manuscript by now and that doing so will improve the flow and comprehensibility of the final product while letting me complete the incorporation of extant literature and empirical observations more intelligibly.

So far, I have been pretty happy with the draft. I think it does a reasonable job in justifying the research question and approach, which will be among the main requirements enforced by the examination committee.

Academic journals and conferences have given me the belief that to anybody well briefed on a subject beforehand almost all scholarly work comes across as a consolidation of the known and obvious rather than a set of blazing and unfamiliar new ideas. One of the books I read on thesis writing stressed repeatedly how a PhD thesis is a basic demonstration of competence in research at a professional level. It’s not meant to be a grand opus. Even Einstein’s doctoral thesis was about comparatively mundane matters of how things dissolve in fluids, rather than grand ideas about the ordering of the universe.

As I discussed with my brother Sasha the other day, I think writing long documents needs to be a process of successive approximation. It’s impossible to simultaneously work all elements into their final form, and it’s impossible to give an unlimited amount of uninterrupted time to any task. The writing process must be designed so that every part can be set aside and returned to, and each set of alterations should bring the whole closer to the final state. That’s how I have dealt with long documents before, and I am hopeful that the approach will take me to the end here.

Kneading the literature and my interview data into the dissertation manuscript

I have all of my data analysis done and printed in a thick binder sorted by subject matter.

With a 58 page bibliography, I feel like I am a good way through the literature review, though my room and computer are still well populated with a set of things which I have read and annotated but still need to be incorporated into the manuscript, as well as a much smaller number that still need to be read.

I have a 98,000 word manuscript, not counting the bibliography, but it has been written in thousands of little sessions and surely needs a fair measure of editing to make it all clear, non-redundant, and smooth-flowing.

Perhaps the following makes sense as a path to completion:

  1. Finish incorporating all paper and digital sources into the manuscript
  2. Complete a read-through and first electronic edit of the entire draft, making note of places where evidence from the interviews would provide useful substantiation
  3. Read through the empirical package, adding relevant quotes and references to the manuscript
  4. Print off and hand-edit the manuscript to the point where I think it is completely ready to go to the dissertation committee for their substantive contents

Scholarly perspective on the U of T divestment campaign

Professor Joe Curnow, now at the University of Manitoba, studied the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org divestment campaign at the University of Toronto, in part using multi-angle video recordings of campaign planning meetings.

Her dissertation is now available on TSpace: Politicization in Practice: Learning the Politics of Racialization, Patriarchy, and Settler Colonialism in the Youth Climate Movement.

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