Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Dissertation boot camp day 3

The three days of dissertation boot camp, organized by the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication, have been highly productive for me. While the advice was good, I could personally have done without the short instructional segments on things like goal setting and editing. What was extremely useful was the structure: sitting in a room with twenty or so other people for seven hours a day, minus lunch, and having fewer of the distractions than arise when working alone or even with a friend.

On the first day I largely focused on taking things I had sketched out in point form and converting them into paragraphs in my draft thesis chapters. I did more of that in days two and three, but ended up concentrating more on my ongoing census of all Canadian divestment campaigns, hoping to identify some participants from each to interview and who could help me find other organizers. I went through my whole list of Canadian universities and sent dozens of emails, actually scheduling at least a couple of interviews. I also added a lot to my big spreadsheets: one to characterize each identifiable Canadian campaign, a universal timeline with important events from each, a survey on the extant literature on campus fossil fuel divestment, and an index of standard types of documents produced by many campaigns like briefs and committee reports.

The experience has demonstrated that being well rested is not a requirement for getting research done, since both the early morning start (by my standards) and ongoing personal stress left me pretty much exhausted the whole time. There’s strength to be drawn, I suppose, from making material progress toward a self-identified goal. I don’t want this thing to stretch into an eighth year beyond September 2019, requiring me to pay more tuition and delaying the transition back into doing productive non-academic work (and having an income where the slow breakdown of all my equipment, clothes, and general belongings is to be expected).

Certainly in some ways the project isn’t going as I most optimistically hoped — particularly in terms of being able to easily get large numbers of interview subjects from each campaign in order to gain perspective on strategic decision making and disagreements — but it still seems like my broad research questions should be possible to answer using my methodology and the people and materials available. I’m also glad that I will have a reasonable amount of preliminary text to share with my committee members after academia’s standard August coma is shaken off.

Boot camp day 2

I spent much of today’s boot camp doing research online about Canadian university divestment campaigns and trying to contact people who have been involved.

Even though all the campaigns have happened since 2012, there’s a lot that has clearly already disappeared from the internet, though some of the websites established by campaigns remain in the Wayback Machine. There also seem to be some campaigns that never progressed beyond a petition on gofossilfree.org which a single person could set up in a few minutes. Helpfully the site lets you try to contact the person who set up the petition, but I don’t think I have gotten any responses so far from any campaigns that don’t offer more substantive evidence like a Facebook page or a media report.

I had hoped it would be possible to interview a fairly large number of people from each campaign, both to help develop a detailed timeline and to get into my core research questions about the effect the experience had on people. That may yet prove true for some campaigns – especially large ones that happened fairly recently – but my hopes of being able to get in touch with one or two people from each campaign and then easily reach a large group of others seem unlikely at this point to be fulfilled.

The early mornings of the dissertation boot camp have been a bit disruptive, especially alongside rather disrupted sleep. A friend of mine who I worry about often has been incommunicado for an unusual length of time, to which my brain naturally responds with a lot of directionless worry and speculation. There’s also another situation where I thought two friends were being treated badly by a third person, but it seems that despite being essentially vetoed my effort to encourage a change of behaviour has just left all three of them upset with me.

On the plus side, it seems like we have found someone to take over the room from our housemate who is moving out.

Boot camp day 1

I’m at my first day of a three day “dissertation boot camp”. I’m working on adding to four chapters: my issue and literature context chapters and the ones I have started on repertoires of contention and political opportunities.

In the lead-up to starting my undergrad program I bought the only printer I have ever owned. I knew I wanted a PostScript-compatible black and white laser printer to be able to print off attractive essays and a deep discount on a large office-calibre machine tempted me into buying an enormous monster which was always hard to cram into residence rooms and which certainly didn’t accompany me to England, Ottawa, or Toronto. Since then I’ve done all my printing with machines belonging to other people, reasoning that it’s better to have someone else handle the maintenance and nice not to have another big whirring box taking up a corner of my room.

Now in the context of the dissertation and some other fairly ambitious writing projects I’m thinking about ordering a Brother HL-L6200DW printer. Several run-downs of well-regarded printers mention the model, for which a 12,000 page print cartridge is $167.86. It does look pretty large but, since my room isn’t in a house where playing music from the stereo often makes sense, I could sell or give that away to make space for it. That could be fitting in a couple of ways. Tristan actually picked out the stereo in Ottawa, as a possession suitable for somebody with a new and well-paying government job and a reasonably noisy one bedroom apartment to himself. A few days ago, he strongly endorsed Brother’s monochrome laser printers for reliability and affordability. Trying to live simply it makes sense to invest in things that you would use frequently and to remove things from your life which are used as rarely as my stereo, especially if those things are cluttering a significant amount of the space you have to work with.

After a summer of expenses and little earned income I am wary of adding even more to my recent set of alarming credit card bills, but everyone who I have spoken to so far sees a printer as a reasonable purchase for somebody in my position.

Closing days of August

I’ve been feeling with August loneliness I’ve noted before in the PhD program, but not as acutely as in some previous years. Certainly having the chance to visit Andrea and Mehrzad in Ottawa contributes to that, as does a general sense of progress with PhD research and even of an identifiable end to the doctorate.

Tomorrow through Thursday I have the dissertation boot camp. Then it’s really just another week before committee members will be accessible again, teaching obligations will resume, and there will hopefully be opportunities to meet some new people.

After many years in the Toad Lane vegan co-op, my friend Tristan is moving to Waterloo for a job. For me, his presence in Toronto has been one of its defining features, alongside that of many of my father’s family members. It’s the end of an era that stretches back before the start of my PhD or my move from Ottawa, and even my 25th birthday. I hope the new job will suit him well. Toronto will certainly be poorer in his absence, and it reduces the odds I will stay here once my doctorate is complete.

Data collection and writing up

My central aim for this summer was to focus on developing my PhD research project. To that end I didn’t seek a teaching assistant position or other paid work, like commercial photography or the time I helped run the Summer Residence Program at Massey College.

Mostly that has gone well. I’ve gone from seeking ethical approval to beginning to conduct interviews with people at a variety of schools. I’m putting together a detailed timeline of events that took place in each Canadian campaign, based in part on the idea of cycles of contention from the theoretical framework behind the project. I have started writing the first three chapters — on the issue context, literature context, and activist repertoires — and I have a lot of ideas for each.

For the fall and winter terms I have accepted three TA positions. One is yet another second year Canadian politics course, with tutorials to lead and grading. The other two are grading only (though I will be giving a lecture in one) within the School of the Environment. TA work will be a distraction from the dissertation, but it can also be useful for structuring time and will help with maintaining general financial stability.

I expect that in September it will become much easier to contact research subjects efficiently, as students, faculty, and administrators awake from their summer comas. We’re looking for a new third floor housemate as well, since the current occupant of our largest room is leaving to pursue a job opportunity selling supplements.

Appreciation for die-hard readers

The whole medium of blogs seems to have largely died, certainly when compared with the heyday of dozens of my friends having LiveJournal- or Blogger-hosted sites. This page has also lost some of its drama since the Oxford and even the Ottawa days ended. The late years of a PhD tend to be a time of loneliness and isolation. Many of your day-to-day obligations like coursework have fallen away and you’re meant to be devoting yourself to a project that almost by definition has appeal to only a narrow range of people.

It’s not terribly clear who, if anyone, is still reading this site, as comments seem to have gone out of favour as well.

If anyone’s still around other than the long-reading family members who I know about, you have my thanks and another invitation to comment. Anonymous commenting is recommended for those who prefer it.