There’s a lot of cumulative stuff that’s stressing me out right now, from the burdens of grading to stress about my dissertation to the constant intrusive noise from the renovations beside where I work. A lot of life lately has been about dealing with stuff that’s unpleasant and which I don’t want to do, without […]
Daily updates
Life at the moment is mostly grading for political science and school of the environment courses, with work on my dissertation slipped into the schedule where there are free blocks. It’s hard to draw much comfort from the US midterm election results. It wasn’t the theoretically worst possible outcome, with a retained Republican majority in […]
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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 […]
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Today I got a carrel on the 11th floor of Robarts Library, right near all the social movement books which are most important for my thesis. It’s probably the only physical office I will ever have at U of T and you can’t fault the view, looking west over one of the sections of the […]
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These are double spaced Word pages with placeholder footnotes. None of it has been edited yet, but I expect that most of what’s in these six chapter drafts will be usable for the final dissertation.
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Even before the grading starts, combining five tutorials a week of teaching with all of my dissertation work has been draining at times. I just got home from a long day, but before I can sleep I need to prepare my lesson plan for three tutorials tomorrow and my semi-structured interview questions for two new […]
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Orientation week is a nice feature of being in school in September. I don’t really remember what happened at UBC / in the Foundations program / at Totem Park residence in 2001, but during my grad orientation at Oxford in 2005 I met my friend Margaret and in my earliest hours at Wadham College I […]
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Since U of T has replaced the inadequate funding it issues in years 1–6 of the PhD with none at all it is causing new problems and reinforcing my determination to finish and defend my dissertation by September 2019. First OSAP (the Ontario student loan program) told me I would get no fall payment because […]
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It’s weird how silence here can be indicative of unproductive inactivity or times when I am so busy I don’t have the time to put anything together for a sibilant intake of breath. I’m focusing on the thesis research as much as possible in the period before classes resume.
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This is my first intense batch of academic interviews, and I feel like they have been going remarkably smoothly. It has been pretty straightforward to start getting in touch with people, scheduling times, doing preparatory research, and then having conversations people about their experiences with divestment at Canadian universities. I don’t think it constitutes the […]
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