Category: PhD thesis

Metrics of activist success

The fossil fuel divestment campaign at the University of Toronto is still dealing with the disappointment of President Gertler announcing such an uninspiring response to the social injury and financial risk associated with fossil fuel investments.

One early response from the campaign was to hold a creative direct action outside Simcoe Hall, home to the Office of the President and the Governing Council.

The action made me think about different ways in which acts undertaken to provoke social or political change can be evaluated. At least two possibilities come to mind: evaluation in terms of the subjective experience of participants, and evaluation in terms of the effect on the thinking or behaviour of the mass public or elite decision-makers.

Subjective experiences (AKA “feelings”) are not trivial. I think the biggest challenge activist groups face is maintaining the health and motivation of their members and key organizers. Indeed, when it comes to big marches like the People’s Climate March and March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate I have reached the conclusion that they are more important in terms of energizing participants than in terms of changing public opinion. Not least, this is because the media tends to wildly under-report them.

That being said, I think activism by definition is an effort to change how the world works and that doing that requires changing the thinking and behaviour of the mass public and decision-makers. To be effective in that, we need to think hard about why people believe what they believe and make the choices they make, and what kinds of interventions can change those things. As activists resolutely focused on achieving positive change, we need to focus on producing good outcomes which would not have happened without us.

From the second perspective, I am less confident about how productive the action outside Simcoe Hall was. For the random student wandering by – or the random administrator listening through their window – did it improve the odds of them supporting fossil fuel divestment? The more militant members of the campaign often talk about “building power”, but we ultimately cannot force the administration to do anything. We need to convince them, which takes us back to serious strategic thinking about how to change the beliefs and behaviours of non-activists.

Managing volunteers

I am finding myself frustrated with the primary challenge associated with trying to produce political change using groups of volunteers, which I would judge to be maintaining accountability and motivation. If the groups aspire to be democratic, that brings a set of challenges too. (The third biggest challenge is probably avoiding and managing interpersonal conflicts.) Still, I think the greatest challenge is the tendency of volunteers to abandon projects half-finished and informally vacate positions of responsibility which they have sought (without handing them over to others in an effective way).

One potential solution is to move from volunteers to employees. This arguably gives you more oversight, perhaps makes them feel more responsible, and allows those who couldn’t normally afford to work so much for free the opportunity to pay their rent, etc. There are lots of effective staff-run NGOs (from the Pembina Institute to Environmental Defence), and taking on a few staff is often an aspiration for any serious group.

Regardless, most people who contribute their labour to grassroots-style environmental groups do so as volunteers, and it’s the effective or ineffective recruitment, retention, and management of volunteers that largely determines an organization’s effectiveness. The other main factor is the competence of key organizers, who must themselves be recruited, retained, and managed.

It’s often tempting to imagine a group in which all members are and remain strongly committed, and who manifest that commitment in consistent and professional work. It’s certainly logically possible that a group could have rules and a formal structure that encourages participation of this sort and diverts the less committed to other organizations that are also doing good work. Such a group could limit the amount of resources that need to be devoted to fundraising, and avoid the hassles, limitations, and democratic challenges of formal incorporation.

The time commitments would have to be manageable – to limit the main problem that afflicts key organizers.

Another question is how to effectively brand such a group and define its role. Being independent would cost the support of organizations with pre-existing name recognition and bases of support, but it would also allow for more of an experimental structure.

PhD proposal progress

I have come across a lot of exciting material for my PhD project in the last few weeks. Documents like the papal encyclical Laudato Si raise interesting questions about the connections between the faith community’s involvement in the effort against climate change, anti-capitalism, and the moral contemplation of the environment. For instance, there are interesting parallels between this theological interpretation of biodiversity loss and ‘deep’ ecology in which nature is considered valuable for its own sake and not only for human purposes.

Another encouraging development is the universal enthusiasm for the project. I have discussed it with experts in faith and aboriginal communities, people at Massey College, committee members and potential supervisors, people at parties, environmentalists, journalists, and civil servants. People are sometimes skeptical about whether it will prove logistically feasible to talk to so many people and follow the routes of two phantom pipelines, but nobody has argued that the project is not worth trying.

Once the Community Response to the ad hoc committee on divestment’s report has been assembled, my top priority will be the creation of a major new version of my proposal for circulation to committee members and potential supervisors.

Pre-research preparations

I had my first meeting with U of T’s research ethics people, regarding my proposed PhD project.

One thing they drew my attention to is some of the policy language in the Tri-Council Policy Statement on Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans, which is like the north star for research ethics in Canada.

One policy directive (6.11) explains:

Researchers shall submit their research proposals, including proposals for pilot studies, for REB [Research Ethics Board] review and approval of its ethical acceptability prior to the start of recruitment of participants, access to data, or collection of human biological materials. REB review is not required for the initial exploratory phase, which may involve contact with individuals or communities intended to establish research partnerships or to inform the design of a research proposal.

Similarly, another directive (10.1) says:

Researchers shall submit their research approvals, including proposals for pilot studies, for REB review and approval of its ethical acceptability prior to the start of recruitment of participants, or access to data. Subject to the exceptions in Article 10.5, REB review is not requires for the initial exploratory phase (often involving contact with individuals or communities) intended to discuss the feasibility of the research, establish research partnerships, or the design of a research proposal.

This is quite important, in part because chapter 9 (“Research involving the First Nations, Inuit, and Metis Peoples of Canada”) calls for a “collaborative relationship between researchers and communities”.

During the next couple of months I need to put a lot of effort into situating this project within relevant literatures, as well as developing a convincing and ethically appropriate methodology for effectively evaluating my research questions.

Climate change and democratic legitimacy

I have finished my final assignment for the term, the essay for my Global Environmental Politics course. It is about climate change and democratic legitimacy:

Many of these ideas are likely to find their way into my PhD thesis, so I would definitely appreciate feedback.

Building options and resilience

It seems to me that one fairly central human aspiration is to have a broadening set of options; it’s encouraging to see new options becoming possible, and worrisome to see options that existed before being closed off forever. In addition to satisfying human preferences, broadening options may also serve the purpose of building resilience in the face of massive change. If we don’t know what the future is going to be like, we have all the more reason to avoid committing ourselves to choices that may end up being poorly matched with the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Previously, I have written about the idea of a steady-state economy. In particular, I stressed the distinction between an economy that is stable in terms of the total biophysical impact of humanity and an economy in which everything stays the same. One critical difference between the ‘constant impact’ and the ‘set in stone’ options is technological development. With a set amount of copper and electricity and silicon we can now make a much better computer than we could ten or twenty years ago. Because we can make better use of resources – as well as avoiding waste, and handling the waste we do produce better – we can still aspire to an improving quality of life, even if we keep the amount of raw material we take from the planet constant and keep the amount of waste we release into the environment constant.

That’s not the only way of keeping our options open, along with those of future generations, but it is a relatively optimistic scenario. I don’t think what matters from a moral perspective is the total number of people on the planet, the size of their homes, or the amount of energy they use. What matters is the richness of their lives. Since the richness of the lives of future generations matters as much as the richness of our lives, we have an obligation to interact with the planet in a way that doesn’t close off too many options for the people who come after us. To me, that implies minimizing serious and irreversible changes in the functioning of the planet system, which in turn requires us to replace the global energy system with a sustainable one, while working to increase the sustainability of other activities. From this perspective, one of the most morally dubious things we can do is continue to invest in a fossil-fuel based economy. Not only will it be increasingly dysfunctional as fossil fuel reserves are exhausted, but our reliance on fossil fuels is the primary cause of climate change.

Life inevitably involves the narrowing as well as the broadening of choices. We can’t hope to keep everything that is possible today possible forever. That being acknowledged, I think a strong case can be made that there is both a practical and moral importance to keeping options open, including across an intergenerational timespan. Similarly, we should pay more attention to irrevocable choices (like “burn all the world’s coal”) than to reversible ones. When it comes to these irreversible choices, we should also be especially on guard for people who simply make the choice that works best for them personally. There is a huge risk of moral corruption wherever the possibility of a big up-front payout with a big long-term cost exists, given that you can take the payout and fob off the cost on others (a favourite strategy of tax-cutting conservatives everywhere). Perhaps adjusting our thinking to pay more attention to keeping options open could be one way of reducing the seriousness of such problems.

Suggest a thesis source

As with my M.Phil thesis, I plan on using various technological tools to help with the creation of my doctoral thesis.

Here’s a simple one I am trying: a web form that allows people to suggest thesis sources.

If you come across something that you think would be interesting and useful to me, please put the details in the form and submit it. Google Docs will automatically compile the responses into a spreadsheet for me.

If you have suggestions about how the form could be improved, let me know through the ‘Notes’ field or leave a comment here.

The magnitude of the original contribution of a PhD

I am reading Estelle Phillips and Derek Pugh’s How to Get a PhD: A Handbook for Students and Their Supervisors. One interesting section is entitled: “Not understanding the nature of a PhD by overestimating what is required”.

Some quotes:

The words used to describe the outcome of a PhD project – ‘an original contribution to knowledge’ – may sound rather grand, but we must remember that, as we saw in Chapter 3, the work for the degree is essentially a research training process. and the term ‘original contribution’ has perforce to be interpreted quite narrowly. It does not mean an enormous breakthrough that has the subject rocking on its foundations, and research students who think that it does (even if only subconsciously or in a half-formed way) will find the process pretty debilitating.

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We find that when we make this point, some social science students who have read Kuhn’s (1970) work on ‘paradigm shifts’ in the history of natural science (science students have normally not heard of him) say rather indignantly: ‘Oh, do you mean a PhD has to be just doing normal science?’ And indeed we do mean that.

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You can leave the paradigm shifts for after your PhD, and empirically that is indeed what happens. The theory of relativity (a classic example of a paradigm shift in relation to post-Newtonian physics) was not Einstein’s PhD thesis (that was a sensible contribution to Brownian motion theory). Das Kapital was not Marx’s PhD (that was on the theories of two little-known Greek philosophers).

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Overestimating is a powerful way of not getting a PhD.