Advice for grad students writing SSHRC and OGS grant applications

Here are the notes and links to the recordings of an informal workshop on doing the initial writing for the SSHRC or OGS programs of study. It is specific to the Canadian context but may have something useful for folks elsewhere. Other caveat: This recording was made from Zoom for the participants beaming in remotely, so it’s a weird camera angle etc.

Audio versions are available through this link

Video versions:
1/3: https://youtu.be/RvxZJ9NtAA4
2/3: https://youtu.be/QqNllpaZLnE
3/3: (the video of version of the final section won’t upload for some reason, but the audio file should work, linked above)

Credit to Karen Kelsky, whose “Foolproof Grant Template” has been very useful to my thinking. I diverge from her in recommending that people do not think about things in terms of “a gap in the literature,” instead framing their work in terms of what we lose if this research is not done, what we gain if it can be accomplished. As I mention in the workshop, I had a dreadful experience working with Dr. Kelsky on one of my grant applications and thus never recommend her one-on-one, but heartily recommend her writing in many areas.

The anatomy of a SSHRC or OGS Program of Study

 Title:

 Context, Objectives, and Research Question:

  1. Statement that positions the reader with you, perceiving the widest possible relevance of the issue/problem you’re attending to.
  2. At least two and no more than three academic spaces in which this topic has been addressed.
  3. However, there has not been sufficient attention to/no one has yet examined/studied/etc … [what happens when we bring these together, attend to a specific area of the big context, etc]
  4. Why does is matter that this has not been addressed, or addressed in the way that you will do it? What bad thing happens? What good thing happens when we do address it? “Without x, we are left with inadequate Y to make important policy decisions…”
  5. I am applying for this grant to address this problem/contribute to the conversation in this way.
  6. “In my graduate work, I will examine X in order to …” “My dissertation asks, …”
  7. Specifics: more about what you will do, ask, investigate
  8. Disciplinary context – what is the conversation you’re participating in?

 Methodology:

  1. “In order to investigate [the question] I will…”; what do you need to do an how do you need to do it to answer your questions?
  2. Data analysis and processing
  3. How is this an excellent approach for your research?
  4. How is it reasonable and possible?
  5. How you’ll address any ethical concerns

 (your) Academic Background and present context: (How awesome are you! why is Carleton such a great place for you to do this work?)

Project Timeline:

Contributions/summing up:

 

Advice on planning to finish your dissertation this year

Here are the recordings, and below are the notes, from a workshop on planning to finish a dissertation in the next year. There are many things specific to Carleton, and I’m making these available especially for the folks who were not able to attend in person, but perhaps they will be useful. Other caveat: This recording was made from Zoom for the participants beaming in remotely, so it’s a weird camera angle etc.

The audio recordings of this workshop are available through this link.

And the video versions are here:
1/4: https://youtu.be/wLkH9kISiEE
2/4: https://youtu.be/SgOULmeZKiQ
3/4: https://youtu.be/RCw_xjbGbCg
4/4: https://youtu.be/baUXYSPCDgE

  1. Orienting yourself, your close ones, your supervisor and committee
    1. Yourself: what do you know about how you actually work? How are you doing? When are things reasonably possible, when are they very hard? Making the internal shift definitively.
    2. Close ones: recognize that “I will be a good parent/partner/friend/lover/etc after I’m done with this dissertation” is not a workable plan. What do the people supporting you need for basic care? How can giving them that also support your process?
    3. Supervisors and committee: how do yours actually work? What do you need to do to convince them that you’re finishing this year and they should sit up and take notice? Assessing how much they believe you about what you’re doing.
  2. Where are you at?
    1. Back-outlining what the dissertation is
    2. The title question
    3. Formatting
    4. Mapping the continuum from the “aspirational dissertation” to the “hang-my head dissertation”

 

  1. Getting a real view of the timelines

DD -6 months: Confirm with your supervisor and committee that you are planning to finish the dissertation within six months, and get a clear sense of what they think will be required to meet that plan

DD -3 months: Submit full draft of dissertation to committee (they may take as much as a month to return comments)

DD -10-12 weeks: Discuss with supervisor who to invite as the External and Internal External (they will approach these people to invite them to serve in these roles)

DD -8 weeks: Submit Submission of PhD Thesis for Defense form

DD -6 weeks: Upload final defense copy to Carleton Central (no further revisions possible)

Defense date

  1. The doing part: Planning activity rather than outcome, but checking on outcomes. Determine your metrics (words? Time? Anything other than “tired must stop”). Scheduling writing. Assuming that the worst happens, and the good-enough dissertation. If-then loops. Limiting work. Committing to breaks and play.
  2. At the end: “managing-up” the administrative apparatus gatekeeping finishing

 

 

Teaching the material: Trigger warnings, what it is, and the ontology-epistemology thing

I’ve just had some wonderful time out in BC, doing interviews for the AIDS activist oral history project I’m working on and starting to look into the history of AIDS criminalization legislation out there (did you know that BC passed legislation in 1990 to send HIV positive people to former leper colonies?). I felt really lucky to have some time with my friends James Rowe and Trudi Lynn Smith, in part for the joy of long friendships and in part because being and talking with them was incredibly rejuvenating. I had a crummy teaching year last year for a whole bunch of reasons, which has been hard for me because normally teaching feels engaged and sparky. This year, I’ve committed to reading and thinking about pedagogy in a way that I haven’t really taken the time to since working as a writing teacher in grad school; talking with James and Trudi about teaching was great on this front on a whole lot of levels that I’m still working through.

I started the school year off, as a lot of people I know did, with the latest round of debates on trigger warnings – this one sparked by the University of Chicago’s Dean of Students. (I liked this response on elitism in this debate, this one on what’s wrong with lay people thinking it’s good to spring traumatic things on people who’ve experienced trauma, and this one from last year’s iteration of this yearly flap about what’s wrong with thinking that giving content warnings somehow coddles students). I’m perpetually obsessed with the entanglement of how we know about the world and how the world is, which lately I’ve been thinking about in terms of what it means to think that “decolonization is not a metaphor,” as Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang put is, and what it means to see the ontological turn as of a piece with racist theory – and am I ever grateful that Zoe Todd has joined the department where I teach, because her work is so generative on this question. I come to this through Donna Haraway and Karen Barad too (I love how this interview kind of summarizes a lot of Barad’s massive book Meeting The Universe Halfway), and through Karl Marx, George Smith, and John Holloway in their engagement with the question of what the difference between understanding the world and changing the world might be.

ANYhow, I’ve been thinking that one mistake the people who critique content warnings in university contexts get wrong is that they think that what’s going on is just or mostly epistemological – that we teachers are giving information about what claims, depictions, and topics will be treated in upcoming material or discussion. If you take this view, all the criticisms about how some people are triggered by breakfast, therefore I shouldn’t have to flag a film where someone is raped or killed make a little more sense; it’s really not possible, within the field of knowing, to know all the things that our students may have experienced and thus what might hit them in such a way that they won’t be able to engage the material in the class (etc). But of course when the conversation gets going, that overlay – an epistemological concern about the limits of what it’s possible to know about and for our students – quickly shifts to an ontological refusal to be in the classroom with them in a particular way. That way is recognizing that we are not capable of predicting all the things that might interrupt our pedagogical commitment to working with students on learning, that learning is a fragile and vulnerable space for everyone involved including teachers, and that being together in the classroom involves caring for each other. The distribution of that care is not obvious (students don’t have a burden to care for teachers, but at the same time sometimes they can be nasty in ways they oughtn’t) and it’s definitely mal-distributed (racialized and Indigenous teachers, women teachers, queer teachers, precarious teachers, and disabled teachers all bear the bulk of affective care-giving pedagogical labour in the university). But thought of in terms of being in an entangled world, giving a trigger warning expresses a commitment to understanding that what’s happening between teachers and students is not merely epistemological but it is also world-making, and entangles being, knowing, and politics. That’s why I give them, and I wonder if that’s why people resist them – it’s so much harder to teach as though our bodies, feelings, and entangled being were always with us in the room.

On this, I’ve loved Ada Jaarsma, Kyle Kinaschuk, & Lin Xing’s piece on “teaching existentialism existentially” since it came out. Talking with Trudi about teaching resonated with some of what they raise, maybe in part because she’s an artist and an anthropologist, and maybe in part because of what and how she teaches. She loaned me a few books that I’m still thinking through but that feel generative: Lynda Barry’s books Syllabus and What It Is, Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, Michael Taussig’s I Swear I Saw This. These are such interesting books! I feel as though they’ll really help me think about what it is to teach more materially – that is, to teach the material while holding an understanding of how we’re all also materially entangled and implicated, but also to teach in a way that engages and grows students’ capacities. But this is difficult! I had an assignment in one of my sex & sexualities seminars riffing on Ladelle McWhorter’s brilliant work in Bodies & Pleasures about cultivating capacities for unexpected pleasures, in which they actually took up practices of various kinds. While it was amazing to see what they did I also felt out of my depth in a way that thinking about integrating drawing or hand writing into classes also makes me feel.