Peace and Planning

Happy (belated) start to the fall semester for those who celebrate! I’m gearing up for not only a new academic year but also the beginning of an exciting academic adventure – this summer I passed my qualifying exam so have transitioned from a PhD student to a PhD *candidate.* What’s the difference?

While I will always be a student at heart, I will no longer have to scarf down a 5-minute meal between back-to-back 2-hour and 40-minute sessions (because it’s too late to eat when the school day is done at 10p 🥱), worry about graded group assignments, or wonder if I’m under- or over-participating during in-class discussions. Instead I get to agonize about much more daunting tasks 🫠! Jokes aside, being a candidate means that I have proven my mastery of material enough to be trusted to tackle research. The qualifying exam – which takes different forms across disciplines and departments – was meant to evaluate my understanding of peace and conflict studies after two years of coursework reading thousands of pages of books and articles and writing hundreds of pages of synthesis and analysis. My exam essentially entailed pulling lots of research together to connect what I’ve learned in my program with my research interests. I had two months to write 8,000 words (really cut it close with my 7,999 word count 😬) and feel all kinds of gratitude that my committee tried to make the exam questions as useful to my future self as possible. Writing literature reviews is not an easy task, but I’m glad I had the opportunity to further develop those intellectual muscles.

Now that I’ve been deemed a candidate, I will shift to the dissertation phase of my PhD program. The first order of business is to draft (and defend) a dissertation proposal, which will outline the overarching research agenda for the remainder of my program. After I pass that milestone, I’ll be able to dig into the research project I have planned which I anticipate (read: really hope) will take around 18 months, soup to nuts. Which means I’m maybe – just maybe – about halfway through my program.

Embarking on this new chapter is an ideal time to reflect on the past two years and look ahead to what the next two might bring. While I was anxiously awaiting exam results, I pondered two interwoven threads of thought. The first was how to do a better job of pushing my field to reckon with the negative externalities of car culture/logic/dominance/dependence and of challenging the narratives surrounding our violent transportation system through my research and writing. To that end (and of particular relevance for this blog), I intend to break sections of my qualifying exam into bite-sized (and less esoteric) chunks so that I can contribute to public scholarship on the system of automobility. An additional aim of this practice is to get me into the habit of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good; I need not spend hours carefully crafting a blog post (that will be read by 5 people 😆) but can do an 80/20 job to get ideas on paper and model what Austin Kleon preaches in Show Your Work! Ultimately, this writing will invite you to look through a kaleidoscope at all the ways I see vehicular violence manifesting in our society and perhaps even light a spark that you feel compelled to pass on to others.

The second thread was inspired by travel I did this summer. I was grateful to be able to spend 10 days in the Netherlands (and thankful to have a partner who was as filled with wonder at the bike/ped infrastructure there as I was), during which time I also *finally* caught up on the backlog of War on Cars episodes that had been languishing in my podcast queue for far too long AND read a brilliant book written by two Dutch folks called Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives. The confluence of these three experiences were a watershed moment for me. They prompted me to lean into even more expansive ideas of what the purpose of our streets is and who they are for. They challenged me to further refine my thinking on myriad topics bouncing around in my brain. They motivated me to imagine an even bolder future for our cities – one that I will be agitating for in my academic and activist pursuits of more peaceful streets…so stay tuned.