Category: Oxford

I spent most of today trapped in the Social Sciences Library (the oft-mentioned SSL) due to the gravitational attraction of a stack of books about neo-liberal institutionalism. Now, I have nearly finished an essay. This is especially welcome since it is due tomorrow morning at 11:00am, during our core seminar.

The essay is about the dullest side of international relations theory: a sub-discipline that I shall label “What are we going to call things?” It consists of extensively argued, frequently seriously embittered tirades about whether X belongs in set A or not. Is Hobbes a realist? Is neoliberal institutionalism liberal, as well as really horrible term? Despite the fact that questions of the kind posed above have almost no relevance outside the bizarre world of junior professorships, you will find them hotly debated. Part of the problem is that these questions don’t have real answers: they only have answers that are more or less plausible to certain people, mostly because of biases they already hold. I’ve been baking in the liberal internationalist oven that is Western Canada for far too long to view realism with anything less than profound skepticism. Likewise, the urge to defend liberalism – particularly variants that account for the more solid bits of the critical theory rebuttal – is fairly automatic. While it’s irksome to have such an obviously constructed and difficult to eradicate bias, it probably doesn’t have too much long-term significance.

There are, of course, important consequences that arise from theory, for it cannot help but inform policy, however imperfectly and indirectly. As such, I can see the value of slogging through these sorts of things. Additionally, it seems highly likely that we will have another interesting and high energy debate during our core seminar tomorrow.

In any case, I must go back to my stack of books and sheath of notes – carrying small elements of their language and argumentation over into my essay, marked with wee footnotes. Then, it will just remain to edit the thing so that it doesn’t have the same ability to drain all the joy from life that a good number of these IR theory texts seem to have specialized in.

Tomorrow, after Philosophy of the Social Sciences, the core seminar, and the Changing Character of War seminar, I have my first supervision this term with Dr. Hurrell. I shall have to review my paper. In the evening. I will be going on a private tour of the Ashmolean Museum, along with Claire and some other fresher graduates. Unlike the Natural History Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum, I haven’t yet wandered into this collection of artifacts pilfered by long-dead British aristocrats. This will mean missing this week’s Strategic Studies Group lecture, but this seems the better option. I look forward to it.

• The proposed second Oxford bloggers’ gathering seems to be falling apart, since very few people can attend on the proposed night. Is there a night of the week when more people would be able to attend? On what night are people least busy?
• One thing I found today that I didn’t expect: the Oxford libraries will give you bags of the highest quality if you need them to carry books through the rain. Made of tough clear plastic, with good handles and ‘Oxford University Library Services’ and the university crest printed on them in blue. The handles are even double-thickness plastic, so as not to tear. Quite obviously the finest bags I’ve seen in a long while.
• Anyone wanting to try their hand at some amateur codebreaking, and who is not too troubled by the morbid, should have a look at Bruce Schneier’s blog.
• While I’ve mentioned it before, Post Secret remains a fascinating glimpse into people’s lives. One of these postcards apparently belongs to Alithea: the friend of Tristan whose music I endorsed in a recent post.
• Remind me to buy Earl Grey tea. It’s a terrible thing to be out of.

To me, today’s qualitative methods lecture embodied much of what is frustrating and unattractive about academia. It’s the parochialism, the turf-wars, the egos, and the navel-gazing. It’s playing an intellectual game with your fellow practitioners, rather than focusing on some project with external value. That value needn’t be the improvement of the world, per se, but merely the achievement of something externally valuable, in a way that arguments that nobody outside the discipline cares about simply aren’t.

Perhaps it’s symptomatic of my lack of certainty about what the future holds that every reading and discussion becomes, at least partly, a study in what exactly I am going to do with myself. While there is appeal in doing a doctorate, it would involve dealing with a huge amount of the kinds of issues identified in the paragraph above. It also brings the question of where to do it: in the States, where the programs that are almost universally considered the best are located, or in Britain?

American international relations is quantitatively focused, aggressively realist, and fairly intellectually limited. There seems to be a very strong hegemonic sense not only of what the discipline is, but what different sub fields within it (like foreign policy analysis) are and what sort of people use them. That might be something of a caricature, but there does seem to be truth to the idea that studying international relations in the states means doing something quite specific, and something based on a methodology that I really don’t accept. I don’t see how stressing the ‘science’ in social science is a useful approach for IR. I think to do so is chasing the illusion of rigour, rather than getting the kind of theoretical grounding that you need to undertake the kind of projects that interest me.

The British option has problems of its own. Oxford D.Phils are very short programs: much shorter than PhDs in the United States. They do not involve gaining teaching experience, which would be important if I was later looking for an academic job in Canada. Altogether, there seems to be very little confidence in the value of doing a D.Phil among the members of the program whose opinions I respect most.

A third option is to do a doctorate in the United States in a field other than international relations. To do something more specific might allow me to escape the theoretical debates that are so abstract, tiresome, and generally inapplicable. This is a possibility I will definitely consider, once I begin applying to further graduate programs.

As I’ve said many times before, however, it seems sensible to do something non-academic during the inter-degree break. Two central planks of my plan for the next eight years are to see a large portion of the world – ideally though a non-touristic lens – and to write some kind of book. Both would be aided by the right kind of job: something international which involves travel and experiences of a kind I’ve not had. As I told Bryony this afternoon, finishing the M.Phil (and hopefully doing a good job of it) should be proof enough for the moment that I can handle the academic side of things. Afterwards, it seems wise to prove that about some other area. I don’t know what is involved in getting a job with the United Nations Environment Program or some NGO, but it’s another thing to investigate in the medium term.

In the short term, the need for a summer job and summer accommodation is becoming increasingly acute.

• I’ve been reading the Murakami book quite a bit in the past few days. As is often the case with novels, it is the voice of the narrator that sets the mood and, by extension, sets my mood when I am orbiting the book. I quite like the crisp descriptions – the personal narratives – that introduce the characters. I would be intrigued to meet myself in the form of such a description.
• The Sainsbury’s brand Isle of Bute Scottish Cheddar is quite delicious: a very sharp, white cheese – it reminds me a great deal of the Tilamook special white cheddar that I’ve traditionally bought during my family’s trips to Oregon.
• Mica has a new video online.
• At the moment, it seems like writing posts of the “here’s what I did today” variety is uninteresting and vain. I will try to be more substantive for the next while.

International Relations theory has a way of bringing out the passions in people. Roham, Sheena, Alex, Bryony, and the rest of my core seminar group had a particularly energetic discussion about liberal international relations theory today. The instructors were similarly engaged and, overall, it made for an interesting contrast with the relatively staid (though informative) character of our history seminar last term. These are the big questions that are coming up now. What is moral conduct for states? Does that question even mean anything? Can we build a better world and address the mistakes of the past? You cannot travel from across the world, at huge effort and expense, to study international relations, without caring deeply about these questions. To be in the position where people both have that level of interest and commitment and a high level of respect for one another is intellectually thrilling.

After a short nap to help combat electoral fatigue, I set about finishing my paper for Dr. Hurrell this afternoon. Now that Claire has taken a peek at the first draft, I should be able to hammer out a finalized version, with citations and all the rest, to be hand-delivered to Nuffield before my noon lecture tomorrow. Much as I would rather get to sleep, duty calls.

Of course, it wouldn’t be quite so late if I hadn’t spent at least an hour in Wellington Square introducing Claire to some of my favourite music. Of course, even the most basic of utilitarian calculations (probably the best I can manage) would demonstrate that the time was enormously better spent from a long-term perspective than devoting another hour to straightening out slightly kinked sentences or regenerating bodily tissues.

Seeing about 1000 visitors during the past 30 hours or so, on account of the election coverage that was here, has given me the slightest taste of mainstream blogging. While I don’t think I have the time, desire, or ability to write the kinds of blogs that tens of thousands of people stream through daily, I do like to write things of interest beyond the circle of my family and friends. Like privacy versus disclosure, it’s just one of those tensions that can’t be eliminated in this kind of writing.

• Potentially useful fact of the day: All my photos are calibrated to look best at 1.8 Standard Gamma and the D65 white point: equivalent to midday sunlight. If you’re using an Apple LCD monitor, these are the default settings.

Not to open every post with a weather report, but the weather in Oxford today was stunning. Not quite ‘jacket optional’ stunning, but definitely getting close. As is often the case during really beautiful Oxford days, the sun was generally either shining through thin clouds or being reflected off of them. In either case, there was lots of bright, soft, warm-coloured light out there to enjoy.

This afternoon, after a morning of reading and sleeping in (following a 2:30am completion of the ORS application), I met with Margaret and took a walk through the surprisingly extensive grounds of St. John’s College. Neither of us had been there before and, while it is universally known to be rich, I was surprised to see just how extensive it is, as well. I didn’t count the quads and gardens, but the place is definitely of such a size that it is a small campus unto itself. It would take you a while to learn your way around.

As seems to be the norm for Friday nights, there was an MCR event tonight. In keeping with Wadham’s status (as Nora informed me tonight) as the 10th richest of the 39 Oxford colleges, there is some kind of Scotch event tonight, following the Burns Dinner whose Haggis I have opted out of. I shall make an appearance: as ever in the determination that this social foray will be a mere prelude to the intense academic and scholarly work the later portion of the night will involve.

About that, my foray to the Burns Night event became an expedition to Jericho with Andy, Abra, Dave, Bilyana, Briana, and others. From a pub in Jericho initially packed to the point of being almost shoulder to shoulder, we eventually shifted to a pseudo-New Year’s party at Green College that was equally well populated. Spending time with Wadham MCR people now, I feel partly as though – for various reasons – I have missed a term, in terms of forging social links within the college. My determination to correct the oversight can be taken as partial credit against my failure to actually complete the aforementioned scholarly and academic work tonight.

• Lesson of the day: overcooking tortellini produces a smily mass that is essentially inedible. Sainsbury’s brand tortellini, I have since been told, is particularly vulnerable to such decomposition.
• Tristan has some new photos up on his photo.net site. Taken at his family’s cabin, the contrast of the icy lake with my memories of our post-graduation retreat is striking.
• I was delighted to learn, just now, that Allen Sens already sent off my second ORS reference letter. As small a chance as I have of getting it, I am glad to know that all the application materials are en route to Wellington Square.