Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Early 2020 feelings

A few factors in the last few weeks have left me thinking broadly about the past and the future: the date roll over to 2020, my 36th birthday, and the feeling of progressing toward finishing the PhD. It has been a mingled set of feelings, but with a sad tone.

Breaking it down into components, part of it is certainly stock-taking about past decisions and outcomes and wondering about alternative courses my life could have followed. That also includes an awareness of how many contingent and semi-random things ended up having a big effect. I have certainly wondered what life would have been like if I stayed in Vancouver after my BA or in Oxford after my MPhil. I have also been feeling aware of all the travel which I have missed since I stopped flying in 2010. In particular, there have been major trips all over the world — to countries and regions which interest me but which I have never seen — which family members have undertaken in that time. I have been feeling a sense of how it’s not always possible to go back and cover what you have missed: the nature of time ensures that missed opportunities cannot be jumped back to, even if they can sometimes be re-created.

Another distinct element has been not thinking about choices or alternative possibilities, but just things which were memorable or important in the past but which are now gone forever. My pattern in life has generally been to have a few close friends who I at least interact with a few times per week. Who is in the set has changed drastically over time, however, with high school and UBC friends, Oxford friends, Ottawa friends and classmates, and then Toronto / U of T / Massey friends. It’s weird to think that there are people in the world who spent long spans as my closest social contacts and who I haven’t now spoken with in years.

All this hasn’t been getting me down too much, and it’s certainly possible to redirect feelings about all these past experiences into a sense of gratitude for having met these people, been to these places, and had these experiences. It’s also not a bad idea to be thinking big picture as I am coming to the end of the PhD and contemplating what to do after. It’s clearly going to be a trade-off between who I want to be near, what kind of work would suit me, and how that will fit in with climate change advocacy. I suppose one big advantage to having this fractured or fragmented past with many identifiable eras and sets of friends is that it avoids the anxiety of having concentrated on one place and one thing and being worried about having too much excluded various other choices.

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

Exploring Toronto

One of the cleverest and most philosophical limericks is:

There once was a man who said, “Damn,
It has borne in upon me I am
But a creature that moves
In predestinate grooves;
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram!”

It’s strange that living in Canada’s largest city I nonetheless overwhelmingly see the parts that are within an hour’s walk of my home, and I tend to see the same short stretches of street day after day when doing chores, meeting friends, or working on my research.

To deliberately defamiliarize myself a little I took the list of 75 TTC subway stations on Wikipedia, drew a random number between 1 and 75, and took the subway to York Mills to explore a new neighbourhood and take some photos.

Next time I’ll try to do a random journey while there is more daylight left, and perhaps with a friend in tow. As an experiment this time I only brought my keys, camera, and a TTC payment card — no phone, music player, cash, or wallet. I had a surprising number of conversations, perhaps just because I wasn’t listening to headphones or staring at a screen, but clearly actively paying attention to what was happening around me.

Life is a set of orderly piles: books, papers, notebooks, and manuscripts to process

While there have been times, mostly when I was at Oxford, when I made an effort to write daily for the sake of communication to people at home and documentation there is often a negative correspondence between how busy I am in life overall and how much I post.

Pretty much my entire effort is devoted to the successful completion of my dissertation and PhD, though a project of such duration is inevitably a study in the practice of survival and the maintenance of social relations as well as intellectual application and research effort.

Amateur radio

While finishing my dissertation remains my top priority, I also signed up for an amateur radio course being offered by the Toronto Amateur Radio Club.

It’s something like ten 2-hour instructional sessions, followed by the federal government exam to get a basic certification and call sign.

It should be an interesting way to spend a couple of hours on Monday nights, provide a useful life skill, and grant an opportunity to meet another community of nerds.

October

September was a comparatively slow month for thesis work. A little bit of that is probably loss of desperation as the project has broadly come together and it has become clear that it’s possible to finish. More important, the social doldrums of August ended so now there are a lot more calls on my time: events at the political science department, friends visiting town, activist happenings, and so on.

Nonetheless, I need to keep focused on finishing the dissertation. It has been a bit annoying in ongoing conversations to have relevant material in the text, but be unable to share it. I’m not planning on taking the academic publishing route, so at least I will be able to release it as soon as the defence is done and the text has been accepted by the university.

14th university September starting

Given how much I have been thinking about ‘the summer’ as a unit, September might have been expected to arrive with a feeling like a sonic boom experienced from the ground or the tolling of an ancient clock bell.

The temporary life reorganization arising from my mother’s short visit blurred the transition, as I had set aside the regimen of PhD work which had become the skeleton for my life for three days anyhow.

I haven’t won any teaching assistant positions for now, so the thesis can continue as a pretty exclusive focus. I may try to get a 50-75 hour grading position in one of the later emergency rounds.

I am aiming to complete my data analysis as soon as possible, while working at a sustainable rate, and then moving on promptly from that to submitting a formal manuscript to my committee members for the largest substantive stage of their comments and review.

Back in August 2017 I said: “The aim now is to get ethical approval by October and finish writing and defending the dissertation by September 2019.” Given that there will be 3-4 months of time spent by the committee reviewing my manuscript while I work on other things, aiming to defend by the end of 2019 seems appropriate and plausible.

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.

Focusing on interview reports

Now that my copy of NVivo has been delivered there is an extra impetus to finish converting my notes from the 62 interviews so far into text file interview reports which I can code using the software.

That will be my main focus until the whole set of interview reports is written. Then I can finish the coding and prepare the raw data package which was the first major thing promised to my supervisor.