Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Getting worn down

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 much sense of moving forward on things which I think will have long-term value.

Into November

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 the House of Representatives which Trump could describe as an unexpected triumph, but it seems likely that the constitutional crisis arising from this president’s disregard for the rule of law will accelerate and sharpen as a Democratic House tries to investigate him while a Republican Senate tries to stop them (and blocks any plausible chance of impeachment). Already, Trump is moving to undermine the Robert Mueller investigation. If their work so far gets buried it will deepen partisan animosity as Democrats take it as further indirect evidence of corruption and Republicans choose to see it as a vindication.

Eroded energy reserves

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 power saws cutting through metal, sledgehammering through apart concrete blocks, and vehicle klaxons from early morning until past dark each day.

Reduced-distraction workplace

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 library roof and across the varsity stadium.

Two strange quirks of Robarts carrels: you get a special card to check out books into them and those books can be renewed an infinite number of times; however, if someone requests a book which is in your carrel a member of the library staff will slip in and collect it, leaving you a note about what they took.

I’m writing a new 1.5 page overarching narrative for my thesis at the request of my supervisory committee at our first meeting yesterday. I also saw Last Man with Holly, which was outstanding. It’s doubtless one of the best historically realistic space films I’ve ever seen, rivalling Apollo 13 i quality of storytelling, production value, and geek appeal.

A month in

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 research subjects.

Independently, I was talking with a friend about our maladaptive tendency in personal social relations to focus excessively on things that have gone wrong and people who either don’t now or never did see us the way we would prefer to be seen. If there’s a range of feelings others can hold about us from -100 meaning absolute loathing to 100 meaning profound admiration and over-riding love, we overemphasize efforts to try to shift the people at -50 back toward the positive — ignoring how the world is full of people who are willing to start us at 0 with no learned skepticism about us.

School’s social side starting

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 met Nora and Kelly. At U of T so far I have mostly prioritized Massey College orientation events, since I became a junior fellow the same year I began my PhD. This year I have put a bit less emphasis on Massey (being off the JF list, I don’t get invited to most events anyway) and given more attention to the Department of Political Science.

Yesterday evening the department has its start of term party in the Faculty Club. It gave me a chance to ask Peter Russell about the BC Court of Appeals decision on the Trans Mountain pipeline. Firstly, he thought legislation to aid the pipeline’s approval was appropriate and likely, given the political circumstances of the Trudeau government. He clarified that in an ideal world people would share our green sensibilities and no new fossil fuel projects would be going forward, but you can’t get elected in Canada now with such a platform. Secondly, that led to a discussion of whether democracies are capable of solving climate change. It’s especially concerning when you get a radical answer from an 80+ year old emiritus faculty member, but his view was essentially “there are good reasons to think not, and a lot of political theorists and ecologists have gotten into why”.

After the official departmental do, a loose band of us walked a couple of kilometres to what turned out to be a highly interesting informal party associated with GASPS: the Graduate Association of Students of Political Science. I had some great conversations on everything from the world’s ongoing nuclear arms race to sampling methods in field research. Hopefully I will see some of the new people I met again. It’s a bit uncertain because there aren’t many places and circumstances that bring together a large share of U of T’s PhD students. People in the same classes and preparing for the same exams bond, as do people who always work in the same study space, but it’s quite possible to never develop social relations with the broader membership of MA and PhD students in politics.

OSAP and U of T in year seven

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 it was all being put toward my $9000 in tuition. Today, OSAP contacted me again to say my funding was rejected because U of T says I’m not registered. Digging through the U of T online portal, I found that they will only confirm my registration after I pay $2550.

That’s confusing since OSAP said it was already paying them, but this is probably just a case of two awkward bureaucracies failing to mesh. I made the minimum U of T payment, so hopefully they will tell OSAP to reconsider their rejection.

I don’t want to go through this again in 2019, so there is every reason to get through the literature review, data collection, writing up, editing, and defence expeditiously.

Data collection

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 inappropriate disclosure of any sensitive or privileged information to say that everybody who I have spoken to — during the preparatory work of consulting on the research design and ethics protocol as well as during these formal interviews — has been generous with their time and enthusiastic about helping to come up with a solid and wide-ranging academic analysis of the divestment movement, incorporating its numerous dimensions including those of activist organizations using social movement strategies to pursue policy goals not offered by existing political parties (in terms of aggressive decarbonization) and those of power structures, forms of decision making, and the individual experiences of all those who have been involved. Not that I am doing all that myself! Through the process of researching campaigns I am also coming into contact with scholarly work that emphasizes dimensions of the campus fossil fuel divestment (CFFD) movement that my research doesn’t seek to investigate.

I’m really glad to have applied a lesson learned from my somewhat soupy theoretical project of an MPhil thesis. Coming at some subject which very smart people have thought about for decades and hoping to make a contribution just by reading the work and thinking is perhaps a bit over-ambitious, at least for me. And there is undeniable value in a research object which involves some direct empirical effort: the generation or recording of some unique data set that would not otherwise have existed, and which has some value for better understanding how the world functions politically.