Category: Writing

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

Aidid on fossil fuel divestment at Canadian universities

Shadiya A. Aidid’s Master of Health Sciences thesis from Lakehead University is the latest major scholarly publication on the campus fossil fuel divestment movement: From divestment to climate justice: perspectives from university fossil fuel divestment campaigns

The thesis examines case studies of “Divest Concordia based at Concordia University, Climate Justice UBC based at the University of British Columbia, and Fossil Free UW based at the University of Waterloo.”

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Slides in academic presentations

I have seen hundreds of academic presentations, the great majority with slides. Unfortunately, I would say that the most common practice is one of the worst: putting all or nearly all of what you will say on your slides. Since nearly everybody reads faster than you will talk, this gives the whole presentation a dragging sense of going over the same ground slowly and repeatedly.

Putting totally different text on your slides is in some ways even worse, since now the audience needs to follow two simultaneous narratives which may not combine perfectly or benefit from being put forward in parallel.

The approach which I use and have found successful is to make myself a Powerpoint deck with speaking notes in point form. With the slides on a screen that only I can see, I can be sure to follow my overall outline and not miss any points. It also lets the audience concentrate fully on what I am saying, without the distraction of comparing it against text on slides. Generally I think it sounds more engaging and human to turn point form text into full sentences on the fly, rather than read a speech verbatim, but if the presentation is very short it can be best to have everything written succinctly in advance and then to try to read it in a way that doesn’t sound like a recitation.

A couple of ways to have slides with fewer problems are to only include very brief summary or conclusion text, which the audience will be able to read so quickly it isn’t a distraction, or using slides more-or-less exclusively to show charts, graphs, and photos. That is what I tried to do with my recent lesson on the robotic exploration of the solar system.

These approaches do detract from the viability of a slide deck as a standalone presentation which can be understood without the accompanying speech, but I would argue that a deck meant to be used that way should have a totally different design from slides meant to support a spoken talk, whether it’s in-person or online. If the priority is the live audience, the talk should be designed to engage them in the moment and not to be a set of reference materials that would be equally comprehensible to someone who hasn’t heard the talk.

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The most important (as opposed to the most powerful) audience for my PhD dissertation

I have always intended my research to be of more interest and use to activists than to anyone else. Nonetheless, I think my tendency in academic writing to criticize weaknesses in the climate movement is ultimately motivated by a desperate determination to collectively take our best shot at avoiding climatic disaster.

Operating under those conditions, I contend that we cannot afford to be congratulatory or to prioritize making activists feel positive over what they have done over continuing to pursue the goals which motivated them. I got into CFFD activism already expecting climate change to be the main work for the rest of my life. My experiences with the Keystone XL protests in Washington in 2011, with Toronto350.org between 2012 and 2017, with the first University of Toronto divestment campaign, and with conducting this research has shown me how many others share that sense of purpose and importance. When I criticize the work of activists it is because I think we cannot afford to fail and that learning is a critical skill and practice for us all, not because I don’t respect the thought and effort which they have put into it.

Plus, I don’t expect anyone to take what I say for granted. One advantage of academic-style writing is that there are clear standards of attribution, with an expectation of identifying where your supporting information comes from. One thing I would say confidently about volunteer-based environmental organizations is that we’re always muddling through and doing the best we can amid our limitations and constraints. Even if you end up fully disagreeing with an idea which I try to advance or defend, perhaps it will prompt you to rethink or refine your view on the topic. It’s through adjustments of perspective like that we can all become collectively better informed.

Dissertation progress, early June 2022

They’re not 100% finished, but tonight I was able to send 2 of my 4 core chapters to my third committee member.

Some things which I am still looking for more evidence about:

  • The salience of climate change as a political issue had risen before the divestment movement began in 2012
  • Climate change is especially salient to young people
  • 350.org encouraged campus fossil fuel divestment campaigns to use informal, non-hierarchical forms of organizing

I am working on incorporating corrections to chapter 2/4 (on mobilizing structures) within the next day or so. Then I can move on to wrapping up chapter 4/4 (framing) with more rounds of comments and changes with committee members. Then I can re-write the introduction and conclusion, fill in any remaining important gaps, and get the whole dissertation to the internal external and external external examiners.

Bert Robinson Park, 11:32pm

Four substantive chapters make up the argument of my dissertation, covering metaphors or categories from the academic literature on contentious politics: the political opportunity structure where activists develop approaches to advance their goals; the mobilizing structures they use to choose priorities and make decisions; the repertoires of contentious actions they perform; and the framing which comprises their world view and theory of how to achieve political change.

I have written many versions of each, in drafts going back for at least a couple of years now. Continuous interaction with my advisory committee is making them more concise and focused on defending specific claims.

I had a fourth version (v4) of the thesis a couple of years ago, but it was an intolerable 700 pages and my committee members had many other comments on what was important to conclude and how to structure the argument.

A few months ago I had a sixth version (v6) available for the committee (the fifth was clean sheet rewrite which I never got far into). It was cut to about 50 pages per chapter to leave room in a standard 300 page dissertation for an introduction and conclusion.

Since then and in close consultation with my committee I have been revising the introductions to each substantive chapter — which lay out a structure and argument and explain how the content of the chapter relates to the through story of the dissertation. With a round or two of meetings or comments we revise an introduction, then I redraft the rest of the chapter based on the largely-formed raw material of v6.

Tonight I sent the revised version of the repertoires chapter, which along with political opportunity and mobilizing structures (which they have already seen and told me to proceed from) will comprise 3/4 of the main text.

I have been very grateful for an enormous amount of sympathy, aid, and support from family members and friends. The whole PhD experience has been shaped by the people who I have been fortunate enough to be close with over these years. Your aid has been indispensable throughout this process of coming up with a book-size idea… and then wrenching it out of my brain as an actual book.

Tokyo’s Manuscript Writing Cafe

Sounds like a pleasant and useful place:

Customers must write their name, writing goals and the time they plan to finish. They can also ask Kawai to nag them about their progress. Those who ask for the “mild” option will simply be asked how they got on when they pay at the end of the session; others in need of a heavier dose of discipline can expect him to occasionally stand behind them, although he insists he makes no value judgments on the contents of their laptop screen.

The mild-mannered 52-year-old, who is a technical writer when he is not cajoling his customers to buckle down, dismissed concerns among some social media users that his tactics were heavy-handed.

“Instead of monitoring them, I’m here to support them,” he said. “As a result, what they thought would take a day was actually completed in three hours, or tasks that usually take three hours were done in one.”

The marriage of journalism and intelligence

“One profession that is particularly close to my heart, a profession that can get away with nearly anything,” Wagenbreth told his colleagues, “and this group are our dear journalists.” Journalists with a good reputation, he said, had excellent access to officials with security clearances and business executives, and could even travel through the Iron Curtain without a cover. Intelligence and journalism, in Wagenbreth’s view, had “entered a kind of marriage,” he said. “They complement each other and can’t let go of each other.” The Stasi knew that the press was addicted to leaks, and that scoop-hungry reporters would even publish anonymous leaks; they also knew that it was extremely difficult for journalists to tell whether a source was genuine or fake, and ever harder to tell if the content of a leak was accurate or forged. And it was another notch harder still to tell whether an anonymous leak contained some shrewd mix of both, handcrafted for maximum impact. The symbiotic relationship found its fullest expression in the active measures field. “What would active measures be without the journalist?” Wagenbreth asked the Stasi leaders. “Revelations are their métier.” The X, of course, had the same métier.

For Wagenbreth, more competitive and polarized media outlets presented a major opportunity. “For the man on the street it is getting harder to assess and judge the written word,” Wagenbreth explained. “He is ever more helpless in the face of the monsters that are opinion factories. This is where we come in as an intelligence agency.”

Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

The “wow” from delayed source discovery

There ought to be a name for the experience, when involved in the long process of writing up a dissertation or scholarly book, of coming across a scholarly source and thinking: “Wow! I wish I had read this several years ago when it was published!”

Going through such a document line-by-line in printout form while making extensive marginal notes serves several valuable purposes. It gives you something else to respond to and cite, knowing it has already crossed the bar of being accepted as scholarly. That’s good if they broadly agree with you (adding another reference with a short citation) and probably even better if they disagree, since it lets you contrast yourself with something specific and scholarly. It directs you to yet other potentially useful sources. Finally, it provides an example of a complete and successful piece of scholarly writing, which is always an inspiration and even a source of comfort when striving to produce one of your own.