Contributions III

I’m hanging with my cousin and uncle, and we’re playing the contributions game. I said I was proud that I managed to put ‘dogma’ in one title, and a goal of mine is to use the word ’synthesis’ in a real paper title at some point. We came up with this:

Geography: A Synthesis of Dogmas

So so true sometimes. I wish I had this as title of my analysis paper of the changes in theory and methods in human geography.

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We hit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a french restaurant and boozed and ate chocolate mousse (cake). Here is what we came up with. It makes no sense at all, kind of like academia:

Geography: A House is not a Home Without Dogma

Canine Identity: Dog or Dogma?

Moustaches: Deconstruction of a Post World War II Superiority Complex (not sure about this one)

Chocolate Mousse or Chocolate Mousse Cake: A Post-Modern Synthesis of Chocolate Narcissism. Is There Any Truth?

Whoopee Cushion: An Appropriate Response to Everything. (my favourite)

Semester Done-O!

A little Krio-ism up there. I finally emailed in my last paper, which was at least 1000 words over the limit, but a classmate assured me it was not inane drivel so it was okay and the prof would like it. And I *did* use “dogma” in the title since my most trusted academic wordsmith (a PhD in anthropology–she deals with concepts I can’t even imagine) said I was using it properly. Heh.

Two really important books for my comprehensives, one on logic, one reconceptualizing ’sustainability’, came after I left Kitchener(they are due back really soon since they are interlibrary). Oh well. As soon as I had set up a meeting with both advisors at the same time the second week back (so I have first week to ‘reflect’ and prepare), I turned on the out of office auto reply on my school email until January.

Feeling that end of semester weight in my head, shoulders. Acupuncture felt like nails. I fell asleep early the past two nights, even though I’m totally into my current read ‘Arrow of God’ (read it, Achebe is a genius). So I’m avoiding running, curling up with some hot apple cider, and watching Persepolis the movie.

Grump-o-rama

Today was the day I finally asked “I quit the working world for THIS?”

My psychic flux of enjoyment is low low low. So is the amount of sleep I’ve had. And the amount of exercise. Academia keeps whispering in my ear “just one more day and the paper/marking will be done and you’ll be back to running”.  Ha.

I miss these days.

I have some goals I will start working on in January, and my short-term check in date with myself is next September, when I am due for the comprehensive exam. I think 8 months is a manageable timeframe, rather than 2.5 or 3.5 years.

Time for some waffle therapy.

Contributions II

I can’t stop the alliteration. Here is a proposed title for my next paper, which I will mull over before handing it in on Monday:

In Search of “Sustainability” in Geography: Rejecting Dogma for Debate and Differentiation.

I think I am turning into Sydney from the comic book dykes to watch out for.

Frustrations and cleverness

Am trying to write a paper about the role of human geography in environmental/ecological issues. Encountering some problems. They don’t address environmental issues as a discipline. And I feel like I get slightly scoffed at for mentioning ecological economics. I could not figure out why I couldn’t find much of anything, despite the fact that some spatial economists pointed out (nearly 10 years ago…am I the only one listening?) how, for instance, the ecological footprint could be improved upon from a spatial perspective. When I finally read Castree’s ” Environmental issues: Signals in the noise” in Progress in Human Geography, I could not help but burst out laughing. Some key lines:

It is a peculiar fact that. while the natural environment is one of geography’s key research and teaching foci, it is difficult to specify what the discipline’s distinctive contributions to environmental understanding are.

uh huh…

Here I want to take an honest look at the diversity (incoherence?) and character of human geographers’ research into environmental issues.

You noticed?

though strangely environment doesn’t get a formal mention in Holloway et al.’s recent Key concepts in geography (2003) except under the rubric of ‘physical systems’

They are making me read that, and I also noticed.

Theoretically, the most exciting and original thinking about the environment seems to occur in other disciplines. Human geographers acknowledge this fact by importing ideas from sociology, science studies and philosophy (among others). These ideas are then finessed and applied to new empirical contexts, but rarely reconstructed.

Maybe I will try if my patience for the discipline does not run out this week. Back to my comment above, that some suggestions came 10 year ago.

Am I exaggerating? When I recently attended an environmental reading group in London, an eminent environmental sociologist expressed delight and surprise that human geographers were studying environmental issues too!

Geographers also seem surprised that I am studying environmental issues, despite being in the Faculty of Environment.

i am glad he resisted the trend by not reducing “environment” to “resource management”, the latter being terminology I really don’t like at all, because it does not invoke understandings of the impact of the economic (capitalist) system.

What has this meant for me this term? All of my papers have involved reconceptualizing work from other disciplines into geographic inquiry.

Office as place

Humanistic  geographers love discussing place as part of one’s identity, or place attachment. Spending *a lot* of time here these days when I’m not running or doing errands/chores.

Sunday morning

Now that I’ve gotten over the little hump of a few weeks back, I’m generally glad to be in this PhD-land I’ve set up for myself. And after all of this talk about prorogation and a coalition government this week, I woke up this morning especially thankful that I don’t work in the public policy system anymore. Emphasis on the servant part of civil servant. What no one is really talking about now that prorogation has been granted to Harper so he can pull his budget together are all the long hours the Department of Finance and some  line ministries likely  have to pull over the holidays. Awesome for them. Pizza at 11 PM two days before Christmas is probably not that exciting.

My current biggest problems are that I have to edit my concluding case study and conclusion for my development studies paper, it’s hard yet possible to run through snow, and I have almost run out of almond milk. I realize that while I was aiming for three years of this, I am now thinking it’s completely viable to make sure it is stretched to four.

Dance your PhD continued

I just can’t get enough of this contest. I stayed up late last night watching all sorts of entries.

This one is my favourite, and I understand transcription now.

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This is one of this year’s winners. I really like the costumes, and how they show how the experiment works with the camera sequence.

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And this is not a winner, but I love the sheer enthusiasm of the dance. I don’t understand the science part at all, though.

“Dance your PhD” contest

This was pretty much the best wake-up ever. Codejill and I have already worked out how to choreograph and costume the dances to explain the co-evolutionary process between economy and environment, and then how to explain how ecological economists embed the economic system within the earth’s processes to depict a more accurate version of how these two systems interact. So exciting. I just have to do my research for a few years to come up with the rest of the dance (the intro we worked out can definitely be for “Dance your comprehensives”).

Check out the winning PhD thesis:

End of term paper fever

One of my audiences favourite stories from me is the time my totally gay (boy) friend had me over to dinner in Montreal in the month of January. I started to feel sort of hot and bothered, a bit sweaty and out of sorts, and my heart was palpitating. My condition made me start wondering if I had a crush on him, which was sort of odd because of his gayness, and also since I wasn’t exactly feeling too sold on guys at the time either. So I panicked and hit the road. When I woke up the next day with a fever and the inability to leave my bed, I realized it had just been the beginning stages of illness, not a life-changing crush. The major lesson I learned from that is if you’re feeling funny, you might be in love, but you also might just be sick.

I don’t know what that has to do with anything, but I wasn’t feeling well yesterday in that same way—sort of outside myself, headachey, and buzzy. But since I was just writing all day, there was nowhere to confuse/displace my feelings. Maybe I’m confused over my love of my papers. And I’m still not entirely sold on either direction for my research, so I am sort of going along, “seeing” the applied development paper, and also “seeing” the theory side, where I am trying out a relationship in my human geography term paper, and for my “fake”, or preliminary, comprehensives exam assignment.

My “fake” comprehensives paper is going well because it seems to be coming along naturally. I now have a professor, who is not *my* professor, sending me all sorts of material and helping me out, which got me over the hump of figuring out how all of these bodies of literature connect (lesson, go with the young professors, since they reviewed the material much more recently, and they tell you the stuff to avoid). After I got this help, I’m pretty happy with what I have come up with. This one is becoming a fairly easy going relationship, as materials that I can use just keep streaming in (see photo–piles and piles of books). I’m thinking I’m going to have to navigate a whole new territory to make a research design, since I’m not sure how typical my idea is, but my paper and I feel like we will cross that bridge when we come to it. Together.

On the other hand, my relationship with my development studies paper on the place-based nature of electricity and development is a seriously difficult, iterative process. I think I will be pleased with the results, but it’s feeling *hard*, and complicated. The problem with the world is that environmental “small is beautiful” ideas have been subsumed and possibly corrupted by neoliberalism, encouraged by the forces of “inclusive” capitalism. It’s all so hard to keep track of, but basically, according to my sources, Greenpeace etc. have not done the most bang-up jobs for energy and poverty alleviation. But where did it all go wrong? I can’t answer that one, so I just gliiiiide past it. And what’s the best administrative model to work from? I seriously don’t have time to answer this in the paper since I’m already 2000 words over. I need to do some neoliberal chopping of paragraphs myself, which may compromise my paper’s ability to deliver benefits to the world. Gah. You can see how this is becoming a relationship with too much processing going on. Zap Mama is my coach in this one–her music is helping me hold it together.

If I push this relationship further, the only reasonable research I can come up with so far is to put radical environmentalists of the Global North in an African hut with solar photovoltaic (electricity) technology, with one storage battery, one television, one cell phone, one light, and two dollars a day (hey, that’s generous). They will have an assignment to learn something new (such as a language), and will write journal entries recording daily activities and usage of electricity, which will serve as my research evidence. We can see if they too watch television and use their cell phone before powering their lights by how well they get their assignments done. I will compile this evidence to evaluate whether environmentalists really think that developing countries should “leapfrog” technologies, and really survive off that solar photovoltaic technology, and whether it really is a poverty alleviation tool.

I think I will put that in the presentation to class tomorrow.