Category: Writing

Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion

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.

Related:

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.

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.

Nuclear papers

Over the years I have written a variety of academic papers on various aspects of nuclear weapons and nuclear power:

1) Written for an undergrad international relations course at UBC and subsequently published in a journal and given an award:

“The Space Race as ‘Primitive’ Warfare.” UBC Journal of International Affairs. 2005. p. 19-28.

2) Written during my M.Phil at Oxford:

“Climate Change, Energy Security, and Nuclear Power.” St. Antony’s International Review. Volume 4, Number 2, February 2009. p. 92-112.

3) Written as part of my PhD coursework at U of T:

Climate change and nuclear power in Ontario (self-published on Academia.edu)

Canada’s mixed nuclear policy experiences.

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.

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.

Entertaining trifles

Watching the Jeremy Brett adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story “The Golden Pince Nez” left me wondering about some of the specific changes made between the story and the ITV Granada TV series, specifically the role of Holmes’ brother Mycroft.

An idle Google search about the substitution of snuff for tobacco ash in the story led me to An Observance of Trifles: a thought-provoking and entertaining discussion of each component of the Holmes canon, including the television and film adaptations.

I have only read a few entries so far, and have found much which had not occurred to me, despite having heard the Stephen Fry audiobook versions of each story several times. I look forward to making my way through the site as a periodic distraction.