First I have to start with what happened yesterday. It wasn’t a super big deal, not enough to make a journal entry about it, but I feel the need to talk about it here as it is related to my polisci class. So even though my day starts in the afternoon I left home earlier as my Political Science Professor’s office hours are in the AM, I hate when office hours clash with my class times but thankfully this isn’t the case for me so far. I went to see him to drop off the book he lent me, the one that has our seminar subject in it. I figured it be best to drop it off as soon as I could rather than wait for class, I also wanted to chat with him for a bit. I asked some questions for the seminar just to clarify some things; I have to summarize the given article for 6 minutes and then criticize it for an additional 4 while also taking questions from the audience. Just thinking about it is genuinely making me tear up but I’m not about to cry in the middle of the library. I also asked about the research paper, we were given 5 topics to choose from and I asked if I didn’t like any of them could I make up my own (as maybe you’ll recall that last semester my professor allowed me to come up with my own if he approved of it, which he did) and it was a big fat “no.” He said it wouldn’t be challenging enough for us if we just made up our own topic, and while I understood where he was coming from I mentioned that the topic I came up with last semester was incredibly difficult so… you know. But yeah, I gotta take what I’m given. Since I like to take advantage of my one on one time with my professors I asked him non-course related questions, all about my future PhD.

Even though I asked my previous professor about studying abroad I still had more questions that I forgot to ask at the time. First I asked him about the whole process of doing it somewhere else and he told me I’d need to get a masters degree first. Which kind of blows as I was hoping to skip it to save time, I don’t want to waste more years of my life. Maybe it’s not a waste but I truly feel like I am on limited time. I pushed back a little, stating I was hoping to skip the masters but he told me that it would be problematic, that I would face a to of difficulties due to missing classes. But I genuinely thought that if you skipped the masters you could just take those classes while doing your PhD. I didn’t ask him about that though, he did reassure me that I could finish a masters in one year rather than the typical two so I guess thats fine… After that I asked if I had to be enrolled at a University here before I could transfer to a foreign one and the answer was no. He did ask why I want to study abroad, with no judgement, I told him that Canadian universities were kind of useless for what I want to study. Not now, I don’t hate my school obviously but what I want to do for my PhD would be very troublesome to do here as Canada doesn’t have the archives I want/need. I really tried to make my statement not rude and he seemed to get where I was coming from but he did ask what I wanted to study so in-depth that I can’t stay here to do it. It took me a little bit to answer and I kept looking outside his door in fear of others listening in, he was nice about it and could probably sense my anxiety so he spoke kindly and encouragingly. I did just say “Marxism” finally, I’m sure you all can understand why I hesitate to say it out loud especially in that particular setting, and he didn’t seem shocked by my answer one bit. He seems to agree with my previous professor that Europe is my best bet, he did mention some UK universities and I brought up Germany as an option I was given by my other professor which he agrees with. He did ask if I knew German, the answer is no but I’m more than willing to learn the language once I choose a country. When I told him I wanted to read the Soviet archives he told me If I wanted access to them I would have to go to Russia, and he wasn’t judgemental of this at all but he did say that international relations between Canada and Russia may pose challenges for me. He did say before that government relations didn’t really matter but with this scenario it really really does.

He worries that if I get my PhD outside of Canada I will face challenges in the job market, they will refer people with Canadian degrees rather than foreign. I figured by having a Canadian bachelors (and masters) that I would be fine but that may not be the case, he says there will be unconscious bias as they look at résumés. If I am to study abroad I will have to be accepted into a very good school (I wonder if going to Cuba would be in thee cards now that I think about it, they may not have soviet stuff but Cuban archives seem just as good). He then asked me if I wanted to become a professor and, honestly, yeah I think so, with that he just gave me my options, I have to do the masters and I have to be careful studying abroad. He is optimistic about it though and thinks it would be good for me, I just have to do well now and then. When I started school I thought I was going to be a clinical psychologist, I figured being a Marxist psychologist would actually be very helpful, but with my aspirations to get more active and educate the masses, maybe being a professor would be better for me. I am now pursuing a double major since I’m passionate about both psych and polisci. Maybe I could use my psychology education to help them with their stress and other woes without crossing the boundaries of professions. At my school there is a senior level course that focuses strictly on Liberal thought so I asked why that one was allowed but other schools of thoughts weren’t. It’s mainly because the professor who teaches that class is an expert in it so they teach it. I asked if I wanted to teach a Marxist course, since Marxism is never taught in depth, would I be allowed to. He doesn’t see why not and that I should ask the Liberal professor myself. I visibly grimaced at this and he told me not to be afraid, that they wouldn’t argue with me or be aggressive but I was still uncomfortable asking some random professor I don’t know. He then said that he would ask for me, which was a relief for me. Before I left he told me not to give up on Canada, that there was a lot of Marxist history here, even his supervisor during his PhD was a hardcore Marxist. All that to say is that I shouldn’t abandon hope and I have a place here if I want it. The conversation ended soon after this and I headed off to my history class.

Nothing super crazy happened in History yesterday except when I put up my hand to mention the Okinawan people during the “Japan and settler colonialism” section. He was pointing to Hokkaido but I mixed it up for Okinawa and brought up the Indigenous population of the island, he was actually looking for the Ainu but my answer was still relevant. I was incredibly embarrassed and will not be speaking up again. I did go to office hours to reassure him that I wasn’t an idiot and to ask questions. He doesn’t think I’pm an idiot and appreciated me speaking, I just straight up told him it would never happen again. I then asked him if during the course we would ever talk about Churchill and the Bengal famine: the answer was yes, as we would go over a ew sources that talk about late Victorian holocausts and to what extent a famine is intentional, wth that he stated that he believe Stalin did the holodomor on purpose (I had to really try my best to stop myself from cringing). I then asked about the Belgians in the Congo and while he thinks it’s a good topic, we only might talk about it during a lecture or two. He then encouraged me to read King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild if I’m interested in what happened as it’s the best book on the subject. My last question was about the research paper, if there were any topics off limits, any that would make him uncomfortable: not really, he does caution us against making the paper a political position and avoid making an opinion piece. We have to do consultations with him for the paper s by then he’ll let us know whether our topic is good or not, we just have to start off with an intellectual question we want to learn more about and go from there. I asked about death counts as the event I want to look at may not have as big a death count as other genocides and if that would affect my paper. He said no and that genocides were more qualitative than quantitative; you can have a genocide where no one died. He asked what my topic was about and I straight up told him I was too uncomfortable to tell him as I don’t know him well enough to say, which was far in his eyes but I’ll have to tell him eventually.

That was all yesterday so let’s talk about what happened today as my Political Science class got spicy. We started the class with midterm prep, it wont be until February but he still wanted to get us ready anyway. There were some mock questions and for one of them, it was about soft power, he brought up Zelenskyy as an example of someone with a lot of soft power as whenever he speaks or gives speeches everybody listens. Another practise question was what were the criticisms of globalization: a student answered with democratic backsliding, with that he asked what an example of that was and another student said Argentina with Milei. My professor didn’t really agree as he was elected seemingly democratically, so another student piped up saying Venezuela. He did mention Milei’s speech at some conference where he went to the podium and lectured everyone about socialism or whatever, my professor thought it was very funny. After that we started the lecture continuing with different -isms. We did go over Realism and structural realism, but I wont regurgitate it as it was covered last week. But a conversation was started in this section about how Canada should be taken more seriously: a student said getting on the UN Security Council, professor asked how, the student said just don’t do what Trudeau did. I don’t know how Trudeau fucked that up but I don’t really care at the moment. Another student, one of the zionists, piped up that he agrees with getting on the council and that he would increase our military presence in the arctic. My professor then says that our military is very bad, its not as funded as other countries, its so bad that even though we promised aid to Ukraine we couldn’t even provide it (didn’t we send a shit ton of money their way?). He says the world is sick of Canada as we are very preachy but we never back it up with action. He then asked the class if we should better fund our healthcare or military, only one student answered and she said healthcare.

We continued thee lecture with Liberal Internationalism: it is optimistic about human nature; it promotes cooperation, multilateralism, international law, international regimes (rules based order); seeks to establish international institutions (UN, EU, AU, etc.); it believes that democracies do not go to war with each other (democratic peace theory); economic interdependence leads to peace, free trade, and mutual sensitivity; there are globally shared values and norms that unite us all. When talking about democracies not having war with each other he asked us if that was true and if we should make everyone a democracy: a student answered that you can’t just impose democracy on a nation when they’re not ready for it, that usually doesn’t end well. We then had a class critique about Liberal Internationalism: its too optimistic and naive, it doesn’t consider the differences in people’s needs, it assumes that everyone will play nice (with this it was said that China, Russia, and NK have no interest in being friends, to that I ask “why is that?”), and the last critique was the view from the Global South; they don’t want to hear about “interdependency”o as they have been made dependent and have been exploited, to them the Global North has ulterior motives.

Next we talked about Social Constructivism, which is anti-foundationalist. It is a social theory that believes our reality is socially constructed, unlike realism which believes in material power, social constructivists believe in ideational power: ideas shape interests and identities. While realists believe that the world is in a state of anarchy, anarchy is to social constructivists what state’s make of it. The state reproduces global structures and structures can remake states. Norms are standards of behaviour, and after this we learned about the “logic of consequences (cost/benefit)” and “logic of appropriateness.”

We then talked about the Norms Cycle Theory by Sikkink and Finnemore: norms emerge, cascade, and then become internalized. Because this generation, our generation, is so environmentally focused, it’s our norm, he asked us if we believed in banning plastics. Some students spoke up saying no as it wont help the environment or it’s just not the biggest change that could be made. With that he asked us why Trudeau was so adamant on banning plastics. Some say it was because he wants votes, others say he’s out of touch, the “out of touch” comment sparked a guy to talk about how many politicians are just too old for the job, they’re old and out of touch, Trudeau is this. Which doesn’t make sense because isn’t Trudeau only in his 30s-40s? My professor even laughed at this and said Trudeau is in his prime so definitely not too old. This age things had my professor expressing his desire to see younger people more involved in politics and that there are too many old people taking up space. To my professor Biden is way too old for the job and he reminds him of a Soviet leader that could barely walk, apparently two other leaders passed before him (they were also old) and to remedy that they replaced them with a super old zombie guy. When he died the people were frustrated and brought in Gorbachev. I don’t know which old leader he was talking about but, yeah, that happened.

The lecture continued with Feminism. Since its such a large and diverse topic we didn’t go too in depth, he just emphasized that there were many types of feminism (Marxist feminism all the way baby) but the gist of it was feminism assess the role of women in the political realm and what unites the different types in the state of women being diminished; also the subordination of women (someone made a sporting sound to this and I can’t tell if they were laughing or sneezing). Ann Tickner was mentioned here as well. My professor asked if we could realistically see a female president happening in the next ten years, a guy visibly nodded and he was asked to elaborate, he said something about Kamala Harris. Yeah maybe when Biden dies. My professor then said that Kamala is very disliked by democrats and they are seeking to get rid of her. For Canada, while there was already a female prime minister (who only lasted a few months) some guy thinks Chrystia Freeland would be a good PM (absolutely not!), there was audible disagreement from quite a few people and I did not hide my grimace. If she ever becomes Prime Minister and isn’t kicked out rapidly I’m leaving. There was then a weird discussion about feminism in general after this, which clearly showed that nobody really knew what the fuck they were talking about, and it made me a bit uncomfortable.

We then completed the lecture with Marxism (I drew hearts). Again, this is a caricature of Marxism: it focuses on economic systems and classes; economic determinism; society is composed of the superstructure and economic base; the base is the means of production and relations of productions (the 2 classes); bourgeoisie and proletariat; the proletariats will have a revolution which will establish a dictatorship of the proletariat which will lead to socialism and then to communism. My professor then asked if Marxism was relevant in 2024, no one piped up but he knew that I knew the answer. He then said that 5 billionaire own 40% of the global wealth,a den due to the disparity between the classes Marxism is for sure relevant. He then asked if we re comfortable with socialism and if it was relevant: a girl said “why not?” Another student said that capitalism was not working, why? Some say over consumption, others say the monopoly issue, a few stated that there were too many choices for the same shit. One of thee Zionist guys piped up stating he didn’t see a problem with this, that’s its fine we have seventy options for the same product, that one is cheaper than the other and its up to consumer discretion. The girl then said that it was a problem due to the monopoly issue and that there wasn’t really an ability for people to freely participate in the market, he then argued back that capitalism allows that and they can do whatever they want, she attempted to interrupt him and he snapped back at her asking if he could finish “holy shit” he ended his statement with. This was the spice I was taking about. He says the problems with our capitalism is because socialism has been infecting it and creating entitlement within people, it’s ruining the market. What a btch ass btch. My professor finally stepped in to put an end to this stupid debate, stating that we weren’t here to argue theory, and that in reality true capitalism doesn’t exist as most systems have a mixture. In China there is state capitalism, AKA socialism with Chinese characteristics, and even in the US (the bastion of capitalism) provides school lunches and food stamps, that sounds like socialism! So in actuality, the whole capitalism vs socialism thing doesn’t exist. Class then ended, thank god. I did linger because it seemed my professor wanted to speak with me. After everyone left he told me that the Marxism we discussed was caricature and I assured him I knew that very well. He asked if I was prepared for the seminar, I asked him to clarify whether he was talking about my materials or emotional preparedness, he said both and I said no, I wasn’t ready. Specifically emotionally, I haven’t written my slides but I’ll be fine with that, it’s the actual presenting part I’ll have problems with. I told up front that I would cry and have big issues, he was kind about it and said I’d do fine and reiterated what I needed to do for the presenting. He said I’ll need this for grad school, too. I then told him I didn’t want to answer questions from the class he said that he would jump in and answer if need be and support me which was nice. He said to remember that I was only presenting for one person, yes there are a bunch of students but I’m only presenting for one (which I’m assuming is my professor himself). He ended this mini pep talk telling me that he was certain I will do well and that I know more than the rest of the class so it’ll be fine. That made me feel a bit better, but every time I think about the seminar I tear up. Oh well.