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Pivoting away from specific research topics when fieldwork is impossible to do

Let me state something with absolute certainty: I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYONE SHOULD BE ENGAGING IN DOING PHYSICAL, OUTDOOR FIELDWORK RIGHT NOW. The personal risk that students, faculty, research associates, postdoctoral researchers, and staff would be facing would violate any and all standards of care for field research, given the current coronavirus pandemic. Not only would it put researchers at risk, but also the communities under study.

Waste picking in Madrid

Photos from trash bins from when I did fieldwork in Madrid, Spain, in February of 2016

On Twitter, I wrote a micro-thread responding to some (well-intentioned and well-meaning) scholars who suggested that it would be possible to simply pivot from physical, on-the-ground ethnography to digital under current conditions (i.e. widespread COVID-19 with high risk of contagion). As you may remember, I wrote about this earlier this month.

I study informal waste pickers’ individual and collective behaviours. There is no way I can continue to do this using digital ethnography. I investigate access (or lack thereof) to water and sanitation within very marginalized communities. Given COVID-19’s global reach.venturing on the field at the current moment of the pandemic would probably be an assured death sentence. I am immunocompromised. I have been VERY lucky that I have been able to do ethnography for years. I was going to deploy field experiments this year. I don’t think I can. I don’t think I SHOULD.

My own view (and obviously this is a conversation that students and their supervisors will need to have) is that the research question will need to shift to accommodate current conditions. This means, resorting to online interviews whenever possible. Or digital archives.

ut we need to be honest about the obstacles current social (and natural) sciences & humanities face:

– accessing physical archives may not be feasible anymore.
– undertaking participant observation may not be advisable anymore.
– deployment of field experiment may not happen

Sorry to be the dissenting voice, but I think we ought to rethink students (and our own) research projects to adapt to the fact that we are in the midst of a global pandemic. And my considerations don’t even factor in the fact that people may not be able to FOCUS on research (care work, personal worry, etc.)!

I will rummage through my datasets (qualitative, quantitative, photographs from archival sources and newspapers and maps) to see what I can make available, but I think we ought to rethink research projects. And I’m happy to be a sounding board if need be for methods’ discussions.

I want to add one thing that is specific to PhD committees, PhD and Masters/undergrad advisors and external examiners: if a student had to abruptly cut their fieldwork because, well, COVID-19, I very strongly believe that YOU HAVE THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO TAKE THIS INTO ACCOUNT. I can assure you, they would probably continue to do fieldwork if there were no shelter-in-place/quarantine requirements. We all end up being a bit risky with our projects (I know for a fact I take risks when doing ethnography in marginalized areas). But we need to be flexible, considerate/humane.

This is a time of global crisis and we need to reimagine not only research questions, but also the research methods we use and how we engage with our communities. Dr. Kate Parizeau (University of Guelph) and I call our method and framework of engagement Doubly Engaged Ethnography. Hopefully our journal article will be helpful to you all in engaging the tough question of how we do ethnography with vulnerable communities (and how we pivot away from physical fieldwork to a different method and perhaps, another research question).

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 6, 2020

Finishing a dissertation, thesis or book manuscript: A few tips and ideas to help with completion

Because of the COVID-19 lockdown, I have been working from home now basically every day. Since I’m staying at my Mom’s for the duration of the shelter-in-place period, and I have a full-fledged home office complete with bookshelves, desks and a desktop computer, printer, and wireless internet, I have been able to focus a bit more on writing than when I’m back in Aguascalientes and I go to campus on a daily basis.

Desk at my CIDE office

At the same time, I still have many pending deadlines. My psoriasis-dermatitis-eczema set me back basically 7 months behind on everything. I have two particular manuscripts long overdue, and a couple of revise-and-resubmit resubmissions I need to send back. But one specific milestone that I cannot postpone is the delivery of my coauthored water conflicts book. This particular manuscript had to be delivered before April 11th, 2020, so I have been writing non-stop. As I was finishing up, I realized that this process felt a lot like when I was completing my doctoral dissertation. I therefore wrote a Twitter thread that I am transcribing in this blog post. My advice is very similar to what I suggested when I described my process to generate a full first draft of a paper or article in 8 steps. Basically, I write in bits and pieces (memorandums) and then I assemble the entire manuscript once it takes reasonable shape.

But assembling this one reminded me of my experience finishing my doctoral dissertation. This post explains the roadblocks I faced too.

1) Assemble the entire document as soon as humanly possible.

I wrote my dissertation (and this is a co-written book) in bits and pieces. Therefore, a lot of what I have been doing with this book is ASSEMBLING. Assemblage refers not only to the process of copying and pasting, but also making sure that the text has coherence. It needs to read approximately as though it’s the same voice (in the case of coauthored books). Making sure that the writing flows and that there is homogeneity in voices (or if it is an edited volume, that all chapters share the same Red Thread/Throughline) takes a lot of time and thinking.

2) Don’t leave ALL the formatting to the end.

This is a common mistake a lot of people make, not only me. One of the rationales for leaving all the formatting to the end is that “we don’t want to waste valuable creative writing time”. WRONG. I spent WEEKS formatting tables, graphs, diagrams, headers, footers, headings. What’s taking me A LOT OF TIME with this book is the formatting, making sure it’s homogeneous throughout. Formatting includes making sure that all tables, graphs, maps, figures, illustrations are properly labeled. I spend an inordinate amount of time using the “Insert Title” function to label tables and figures and make sure that I can create a table of titles and a table of figures towards the end. I did this with my PhD dissertation, and now that I did it with the full water conflicts manuscript, I completely recalled what a pain this was.

Working set up at my home office (Aguascalientes)

3) Ensure that all the references are in your Mendeley (or Endnote, Zotero, Papers, Citavi, Refworks).

Reference cleaning and bibliography assembly are EXHAUSTING. I absolutely adore Mendeley and I have written both a handy guide on how to use it to write papers and a post on how I use the Cite-o-Matic function of Mendeley to “dialogue” with Word and insert references as I go. But having the discipline of reading, importing into Mendeley, and cleaning the reference, requires forethought and assigning time to this process. Otherwise, we end up spending hours uploading references we are missing. I am sure you all have done the “INSERT REFERENCE X HERE”. Yeah, I do that too. And if I don’t do it right there and then, I sometimes forget and then I have to spend an entire morning finding the piece in PDF format, uploading it to Mendeley and cleaning the reference.

4) Extract bits and pieces of each individual chapter’s conclusions and copy them into the final conclusion of the book.

Remember, the concluding chapter’s purpose is to say “these are the things we learned, and I did promise you you would learn these, so here they are”. With regards to conclusions, I’ve written before about how to write a concluding chapter for a book, and for a paper, but I also want to share wisdom that Dr. Pat Thomson shared as a response to my Twitter thread.

5) Print the entire thing ONE TIME for editing purposes.

I know, suggesting that you should print out your document is a bit of a heresy. I’m an environmental politics specialist, but I can’t edit on screen, so I recommend doing ONLY ONE printout, pointing OUT the errors, and then cleaning them. After doing that, I don’t print a second copy. I just generate a PDF. I know that there are people who can edit on screen, but I cannot.

I just want to add one thought that came to me as I was writing this blog post: this is a stressful time. If you can or need to finish a book manuscript or a thesis, I do hope that these tips will be useful to you, but more than anything, I recommend that you be kind to yourself. Finishing up such a major piece of work is hard and takes a lot of energy and it’s a draining process, so make sure to take time off once you’re done.

Good luck!

Writing laptop at home

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 6, 2020

On the importance of individual infrastructure in remote learning and teaching – what role for the university?

I am lucky that I am not teaching this semester, given how COVID-19 has thrown everything into disarray for so many scholars around the world. Not teaching during the first semester of the year is actually normal for me, and I recognize my huge privilege to be able to do this type of scheduling. For the past few years, I have moved all my teaching to the fall so that I can do fieldwork and academic conferences during the spring. Obviously, sometimes, students request my courses and therefore I have them added on to my spring schedule, something that forces me to rethink my fieldwork and travel season. Anyway, I was thinking about the importance of infrastructure now that we have been forced to do emergency remote teaching and learning.

RPV at U of A
Me teaching a Master class at the University of Alberta, Fall 2019

My tweet summarizes my concern:

Universities (and other learning organizations) thus have a democratizing and equalizing function: they provide infrastructure (computers, internet, library books/space) for EVERYONE. Being forced to go remote, we also forget structural inequalities across the student body and faculty. I remember one time, when a project officer for the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung told me “please have everyone participating in your workshop scan their IDs and send them to me”. What makes you (this project officer) think EVERYONE has a scanner/printer/robust wifi to scan-to-PDF and send? Jesus.

I shared a couple of anecdotes from when my Mom did her PhD at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in Spain. When Mom was doing her doctorate in Madrid, she often times had to go work late at their local “locutorio” (a computer lab where computers and internet were available to rent). Simply because she didn’t have wifi at home to send her homework. Terrible.

Another anecdote from that epoch. Mom did her PhD in Spain (Madrid, Complutense) at the same time I was doing mine in Canada (Vancouver, UBC), and my oldest brother was doing his in the US (South Bend, Notre Dame). She had a laptop, and worked from her “piso” (apartment). one time, she was finishing a paper for a class late at night, and before she could save it to a USB her laptop died.

At 1 am.

She had to leave her house and go to a “locutorio” and rewrite her f****ng paper FROM SCRATCH. Mom had to walk alone through the streets of Madrid at 1 am so she could find a locutorio that would be open so she could rewrite her paper. She found one and rewrote the damn paper from scratch. She finished at 8 am, having had zero sleep, sent it out, printed it and then walked home, showered, went to class on zero hours of sleep. So yeah, am I very sensitive to students and staff and faculty’s disparities in technology and infrastructure? Absolutely.

My Mom’s experiences really reminded me of how stark these infrastructure inequities are.

The point of this blog post and my original tweet is to remind ourselves of two interrelated issues:

1) There is enormous heterogeneity in personal infrastructure for online learning and teaching. When we have to move our teaching to online platforms, we rely on OUR infrastructure including computer equipment and internet access, and we may not have the most ideal. Our students may have limited online access or no computing equipment. We MUST take into account these challenges they may face. This is also true for faculty AND staff.

2) My point wasn’t a critique of universities, but more of the governance of higher education system itself. Universities play a democratizing role by providing infrastructure. Governments should properly fund universities, colleges and schools so that they can pass on infrastructure improvements, subsidies and support to their students and faculty.

Anyway, challenging times ahead, and the discussion that arose from my tweet is extraordinarily enlightening. I encourage you to read my Twitter thread and responses to it, including quote tweets.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 4, 2020

Project management for academics II: Tracking and managing your time

In a previous life, I studied AND did project management for a living. I decided to apply my experience and expertise in this area to develop a series of blog posts on how to do project management within academia. My previous blog post on Managing A Research Pipeline can be found here. Synchronizing To-Do lists

A few weeks ago, I requested help from my #AcademicTwitter community on time-tracking apps

I have always loved computer software to track time, even though I used to do this the analog way. I had a shorthand notebook and I used to write what I spent my time on. I have had to do this for a number of employers (also known as “keeping track of your time in a time-sheet”. Keeping track of time (yes, even during the COVID-19 emergency!) may help us discern where our time is going. Personally, I like tracking time because it allows me to make a case AGAINST the culture of ““hours spent at your desk”. You can see the responses to my tweet for suggestions of apps. After testing a few applications, I zeroed in on two: Clockify and Toggl. I had used RescueTime before, ATracker, but I ended up just focusing on Clockify and Toggle. Both have Chrome extensions and desktop apps. These two are, in my view, the simplest ones.

Clockify

PROS:
  • Amazingly intuitive
  • Chrome extension
  • Easy to start, easy to stop

CONS:
  • I procrastinated and forgot to turn Clockify on, so OBVIOUSLY my added hours do not add up to 8 hours.
  • This would be the same problem with RescueTime, BTW.

Toggl

PROS:

  • amazingly intuitive, perhaps even more intuitive than Clockify
  • super easy to create a task and a project
  • easy to start, easy to stop
CONS:

  • so far, have not had any cons.
  • I also fixed my manual updates for Clockify.

Both desktop apps and Chrome extensions are intuitive, though I still think Toggl is a tiny tiny bit more intuitive.

toggl and clockify desktops

Conclusion: Evaluating Toggl vs. Clockify I love both of them and I will continue to use them, possibly interchangeably. What I should say, though, is that Clockify has an AMAZING blog with tips on time management. Moreover, they are not shy about promoting OTHER time-tracking apps, which to me shows an interest and care on the customer.

Both Clockify and Toggl have excellent customer support on Twitter.

My experience tracking my time

For me, tracking how I spend my time is something I am quite experienced about. I used to do it in grade school, high school and throughout my graduate degree. I sort of left it behind when I became a professor.

What time-tracking has given me again is the sense of where my time goes. Obviously during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place period, I am sure much of my time is going to be personal. But even now I can distinguish between when I am working on my own personal stuff, when I am doing scholarly work, and when I am doing housework and care work. To me, time-tracking apps are useful. Maybe they will be useful to you too.

But again, let me just remind you: regardless of what you spend your time on, WE ARE JUST TRYING TO SURVIVE THIS PANDEMIC. I wouldn’t stress over what you’re spending your time on, right about now. But if it helps you, maybe my review of Clockify and Toggl may be helpful.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 2, 2020

Mathematical epidemiology, the COVID-19 pandemic and the limits and uncertainties of models

I have been in isolation for the past week or so, because my immune system has always been compromised. I am doing this against the current wisdom provided by the Mexican secretariat of health, but following global approaches to facing the COVID-19 pandemic, because apparently, “these kinds of measures are not necessary at the moment” (ask me later why I am so pissed off at Mexico’s epidemiological strategy against COVID-19). Anyhow…

In this blog post, I want to address some of the limitations of models and modeling, and the risk that we are currently facing of everyone wanting to become “arm-chair epidemiologists” in light of COVID 19. I write this as someone with a double PhD in political science and human geography who has spent years of his life reading, learning and understanding mathematical epidemiology models, and those three degree theses (undergrad in chemical engineering, Masters in economics and PhD) are models of various kinds (2 mathematical, 1 game-theoretic).

I am not an epidemiologist, nor do I have a PhD in epidemiology, and when I mention things like rate of transmission, mortality, etc. I do so establishing clear boundaries on what I think I CAN know. I’ve mentioned before how when I came in contact with mathematical epidemiology.

I started reading up on mathematical epidemiology around the early 2000s (20 years, now), and right after we got hit with several epidemics, including SARS, H1N1, MERS and Ebola. I sought experts on Twitter on this kind of modeling, such as Dr. Maia Majumder and Dr. Sherri Rose.

I understand well enough (thanks to having done mathematical modeling myself) that models, and particularly epidemiological models, rely on assumptions. What makes mathematical epidemiology important, in my view, is the combination of knowing math AND epidemiology. This area is inherently cross- and inter-disciplinary. Mathematical epidemiologists are modelers who understand the epidemiological assumptions and consequences of their models. Many of them, alongside virologists, statisticians, physicians, social workers, medical anthropologists, are losing sleep trying to figure out SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19). Modelers are trying to get the model assumptions right because they know that there’s enormous uncertainty in creating models. We calibrate models with empirical data for this reason, trying to adjust them to reality.

BUT, and here’s the but: reality right now is extraordinarily uncertain, and that’s what is making mathematical epidemiologists (and epidemiologists overall) so concerned. The natural sciences’ component of this epidemics are still developing. We can’t say “this is another flu”. Because there’s so much uncertainty (not only in the models we are using but also on the virology/epidemiology of this pandemics), we need to take precautions that, to some people, may look extreme. People are preaching social distancing and pre-isolation in abundance of caution. This is NOT just another flu and virologists/epidemiologists are trying to figure out why. We need interdisciplinary work where we acknowledge our knowledge limitations, the assumptions we are making, the potential risk pathways that we may need to walk, trade offs we make.

here’s a reason why public understanding of science scholars, communications specialists, risk analysis and disaster management academics are all face-palming right now (myself included). Not everyone is, nor should be an epidemiologist. We need specialists of all areas. We need to develop wiser ways to communicate the risks of COVID and the implications of models we make, and as consumers of this information, we need to accept that models bring along uncertainties, and our activities carry a certain degree of risk. This is all about managing it.

When people say “we are all in this together”, it’s because we are. COVID-19 is revealing why interdisciplinary work matters and our planet is becoming a global laboratory for its implementation. We all, civilians and scientists, have a role and responsibility in surviving this. This is the time to absorb different perspectives on the epidemiology and virology of COVID-19, and the human dimensions of this disease and the potentially negative implications it will have not only on financial markets but also on hospitals and local health systems. It’s vital that we understand what happens within such a complex system.

Models have assumptions and limited predictive power under contexts of high uncertainty. If you need reassurance as this issue develop, follow knowledgeable people and ask about the limitations, assumptions, and implications of a model. Trust me when I say that nobody is more oncerned about getting this right than the natural and social scientists (as well as the people in the humanities and math, communications specialists, science communicators, journalists). But it has to be an inter-, and cross-disciplinary.

Not just models.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 18, 2020

Fieldwork in the Times of COVID-19: Doing Ethnography During a Pandemic

While I have spent close to two decades doing fieldwork in very marginalized communities all over the world, this is the very first time in my entire life that I have been subjected to the challenge of doing fieldwork, particularly the ethnographic kind that I do, within the context of a global pandemia. I joked on Twitter that this would be the title of my next book:

The truth of the matter is: I don’t really have much experience doing fieldwork during a global pandemic. When AH1N1 (the swine flu) hit Mexico (it was actually the epicenter of the global pandemic), I was living in Vancouver, and I didn’t do much fieldwork in Mexico between 2009 and 2010. So, I was relatively spared from the AH1N1. I do remember getting vaccinated, and being worried about my family back in Mexico, but other than that, AH1N1 did not alter my fieldwork in any significant way, from what I can recall. I did bunker down and isolate, but I had already done most of my interviews for projects I had at the time.

The following are some impressions of mine, having done decades of fieldwork within vulnerable communities, and particularly ethnographic work within areas with extreme water and sanitation poverty and insecurity. I do interview-based, ethnographic and field-experimental work. But for the purposes of this thread, I’m going to focus on ethnographic or fieldwork-based research. I am very much interested in pandemics and infectious diseases, but I actually work in environmental politics.

Mazapil - Concepcion del Oro - Salaverna - Fieldwork June 8 2018My interest in pandemics and the modeling of infectious diseases’ transmission comes from my background as a chemical engineer, the fact that all three of my theses (undergraduate in chemical engineering, Masters in economics of technical change and PhD in political science/human geography) are all mathematical (or other type of) models. I gained an interest in mathematical epidemiology since about 20 years ago, so I can certainly tell you that COVID-19 is in my mind for many reasons, not only the health one.

The photo above shows me and colleagues from UAM doing fieldwork in Zacatecas, an area where there’s extraordinary marginalization and poverty. There are mines there and the general population openly manifested during our interviews that they were very hopeful that someone from their families would end up working at the mine. For the work I do, fieldwork is fundamental. This is the main reason why I have been concerned about deploying fieldwork right now, in the midst of a pandemic.

The kind of work I do, especifically the questions I ask, are associated with perceptions of insecurity, and with the social, political and health-related impacts of water and sanitation interventions (or lack thereof). In a pandemic, people facing hardships such as rough sleeping (homelessness) are much, MUCH more vulnerable to highly infectious diseases. People who do not have the dignity of access to a toilet (a human right I have written about and fought for) also face similar hygiene-related challenges that could potentially not only endanger them but also their contexts and environments.

As a highly immunocompromised researcher, I have taken an approach and philosophy towards my fieldwork that is centered in a somewhat balanced way on my subjects and on my own health. I do feel like I owe it to my subjects to study what I do. But at the same time, I also feel as though I owe it to them to be healthy (-ish) enough to conduct fieldwork and have conversations with them and amplify their voices. Navigating field and site-related issues right now for me is tricky. This is the semester I don’t teach, thus, his is also the semester where I do most of my fieldwork. And since I use comparative ethnography, I end up travelling all over the world to different sites.

I obviously cannot do that right now, and I am not going to for the foreseeable future. This is something that has me very concerned. Along a different line of thinking, I want to to discuss how to do ethnography of vulnerable communities. When I do research of vulnerable populations I guide much of what I do by what Professor Liamputtong says in her book, Researching the Vulnerable.

So, what do we do regarding fieldwork in an era of COVID-19?

Rio Manzanares y Parque (Puerta de Toledo, Madrid, España)

A photo of the Manzanares river from when I last did fieldwork in Madrid in early 2016
.

Doing fieldwork right now would not only compromise MY health, but also risk compromising MY SUBJECTS’ health. And this would make them in turn even MORE vulnerable.

I have read ethnographies associated with pandemics and infectious diseases, but not exactly OF pandemics. Some work (including Adia Benton’s HIV exceptionalism) and Emily Wanderer’s “The Life of a Pest: An Ethnography of Biological Invasion in Mexico” is interesting to me but not exactly ethnographies conducted WITHIN an epidemic outbreak or infectious disease pandemic context.

Doing fieldwork (and ethnography) in contexts where highly contagious diseases are prevalent brings up questions of ethics: to whom do researchers owe themselves? I have read countless stories of heroes who first discovered infectious diseases or treated them and were killed. Killed by the same diseases they swore to fight. Thus we end up in territory of moral quandaries. Should I die (or risk dying) to expose the challenges facing decimated societies who are afflicted by infectious diseases? What is the value of my risking exposure? Do I do more/less? These are questions that keep making the rounds in my mind and I don’t have answers for them.

To those who are finding being on the field right now and feeling emotionally and mentally challenged and overwhelmed, I think I can say this:

I get it.

I get you.


I hear you and I see you.

I think it’s important to protect oneself AND the populations we study. We are in this together. Take as many precautions as you need, and “abort the mission” if you need to.

No degree or research project is worth, in my view, risking your life.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 17, 2020

A sequential framework for teaching how to write good research questions

The more theses I supervise, the more essays I read and the more papers I have to peer-review for publication, the more I realize how important it is to teach how to craft good research questions. Many students of mine come with a general idea of what they want to study for their thesis, but then get stuck with how to develop the research project. And for me, the core issue when doing research is asking good, researchable questions. Key to this issue of “researchable” is the practicality and feasibility of undertaking a project that will provide answers to the question.

My campus office when I am working

To develop good research questions you need to READ, absorb and synthesize a lot of literature in order to find a gap to fill.

I use my own work to teach my students how to write good research questions. I show them how I am interested in particular topics, and how my work is driven by having an inquisitive mind and wanting to get answers to complex challenges by asking the right questions (you can read more about my research trajectory here).

I had been pondering for a long while how to teach my students how to write good research questions, and as I was reading Patrick White’s “Developing Research Questions”, I came up with a sequential approach to teaching the craft of writing good, researchable questions. This approach (which is a bit different from White’s funnel (see page 26), but at the same time, uses the same general-to-specific strategy) walks the student (or researcher!) through the different stages of developing a solid research question by going from the more general to the more specific.

In this blog post, I walk the reader through my sequential framework.

  • Research Topic: This refers to the broader topic one is interested in. For example, I am quite interested in theories of the commons as posited by Elinor Ostrom. That’s one of my broad research areas: the governance of resources that can be accessed by many but are also exhaustible. One can have an interest in many research topics, but it is always important to go broad in deciding what kinds of issues one wants to research (for example, health policy in Mexico, homelessness policy in the United States). Then one can go narrower when focusing on a specific area of interest (geographical, scale, sub-sector/population).
  • Research Interests: These refer to more narrowly defined sections or parts of a broader research topic. In my case, my specific research interests lie in the governance of unorthodox commons, such as wastewater, bottled water, and solid waste. Some people may find the notions of “interest” and “topic” interchangeable. I view the Topic as a broader area of work, whereas Interest is specific to the researcher. For example, I work in water governance, but I am interested more specifically in how urban water is managed.
  • Gap in the Literature: The gap in the literature refers to that specific niche where your contribution may lie. The unanswered questions. The broader realm (narrower than the research interest, but broader than a research question) where you have a wide range of questions to ask. I have already written about how we can find the gap: for a dissertation or thesis proposal and for a research paper and/or literature review. As an example, in my case, I contribute to narrow our gap in understanding how commons theories work in the case of unorthodox, “unwanted” resources. These resources are what I, in my research, have called “negative commons”. My work fills the gap on how negative commons are managed and re-valued.
  • Originality: This property of research work refers to the novelty, to how and why is a new analysis worthy of study. Generally, what I ask my students to think about is when trying to understand whether their work is original is: “how is it that nobody or few people had thought about this particular topic and interest and issue before in the way you are approaching it?” When I ask my students this question, their eyes light up. They understand that you can be original by looking at an older dataset with new theories, developing a new theory, or assembling a new dataset (see my discussion and conversation with Dr. Michael Horowitz). In the example I provide, my work is original because wastewater governance researchers hadn’t discussed effluents as “negative commons” (though Dr. Alida Cantor has contributed to this conversation in her own work analyzing wastewater as a commons, we use slightly different conceptual frameworks).
  • Research Question: A good research question can be answered, is researchable, feasible, and contributes to narrow/close athe gap in the literature through an original or novel contribution. Again, it is important to remember that the contribution does not need to be “life-changing” or “earth-shattering”. Most scientific research is incremental and therefore one contributes by adding bits and pieces to a broader, larger global puzzle. See, for example, my earlier post on developing solid research questions. In my case, I have studied and researched some of the key obstacles to robust wastewater management in one specific geographical area of Mexico, the Lerma-Chapala river basin. I have done so by developing and applying my “negative commons governance” framework.

I have crafted a handy Google Sheets spreadsheet that you can use to both teach how to write good research questions with my framework, and for your own research projects. It can be downloaded by clicking on this hyperlink. Hopefully this blog post, framework and spreadsheet will be of use to you all, and if you are an instructor, to your students!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 4, 2020

On the responsibility of crafting a syllabus

The choices we make on whom to include and whom to exclude as we choose the readings for a syllabus are important and can be a political act as well. One of empowerment or one of exclusion. I strongly believe that we have a responsibility when designing syllabi.

Dr. Elinor Ostrom was the global authority on commons governance and institutional theory. Eliminating Dr. Ostrom from a syllabus on institutional analysis, on commons theories, on governance theories, etc., is purposefully denying her place in the global landscape of scholarship.

This IS an omission.

(I have seen it done, and seeing it has made my blood boil, BTW).

As scholarship evolves, who is the canonical citation/authority does as well. And you can purposefully choose to highlight scholars who have not had as much “action” in the literature, or choose to obscure them. I also feel like crafting a syllabus is a responsibility. I have the duty to my students to provide them with the best available knowledge (to my understanding, and within my own limits, of course). And I have a duty to scholars to make their work shine, particularly those who haven’t had as much “play” in the global citation game.

Citation has its own politics, and as a result you get to decide who you highlight in syllabi and citations. I very strongly believe we have a responsibility to have diverse citation lists and syllabi.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 23, 2020

Writing in Social Spaces: A social processes approach to academic writing (my reading notes)

I remember when I was starting my doctorate, a number of faculty told me that they did not foresee me finishing my dissertation because I was very social. I can only assume that my being social was seen as “not serious enough to work alone and concentrate in his research and writing”.

Writing

Well, not only did I finish my PhD, I have now advised and taken several students to completion of their own doctorates. I think being social in graduate studies is not a hindrance but an asset. I very strongly think (and have believed for a very long time) that research and scholarly writing should be social activities. I am so glad that Dr. Rowena Murray’s “Writing in Social Spaces: A Social Processes Approach to Academic Writing” validates my belief in the sociality of academic writing and research.

Dr. Joy Langston from the Political Studies Division at CIDE is a full tenured professor of political science and expert in elections, the PRI, & Mexican politics (and a very close friend of mine). She’s also National Researcher Level 3 (the highest). In short, she’sa very well published academic rock star. Dr. Langston led writing meetings for CIDE faculty a few times over the past few years. Joy led Weekly writing meetings for CIDE faculty a couple of times over the past decade, following
Wendy Laura Belcher

Personally, I found this exercise very helpful and now I do something similar with my thesis students. I am grateful to Joy for having led those workshops. Anyway, back to Murray’s book. It’s excellent, and you should all read it.

I want to use Murray’s Writing in Social Spaces to add a couple of my own thoughts. One reason why we may not find writing meetings useful is because sometimes they are itinerant, and that’s why we resort to writing retreats. What I like about Murray’s model is her concept of disengagement.

I am writing at home today (at the time of writing this blog post). Doing this on a regular basis becomes complicated because I work for a government institution which often requires me to be physically on campus, sometimes every day. This is also the main reason why I write in the mornings (and why I start working at 4 in the morning). Because of my (tacit but very explicit at times) requirement of being on campus as much as possible, I find it really hard to spend full days writing at home. I travel a lot and I have this belief that when I am in Aguascalientes, I MUST be on campus for meetings, and so students can reach out to me and meet with me if they need to discuss stuff.

I feel like a challenge we face is OUR INABILITY TO DISENGAGE. We have so much stuff to do that it is difficult to disengage from the office, from our fears, from our self-doubt, from the overwhelming list of tasks we have to fulfill. But that’s also why I find Murray’s conceptual model of social writing so helpful.

Yesterday, two of my PhD students came from Zacatecas (where they live) to Aguascalientes (where I live) and we wrote TOGETHER. They worked on their theses and I worked on 3 papers I have long overdue. Writing as a group DID help them and did help me too.

Writing IS social.

BUT….

And here’s the BUT.

We need SPACE and TIME to think and write. To disengage, we need to have the right conditions. If our institution does not allow us to disengage from the campus office, THEN they need to provide the on campus physical space to ENGAGE with writing.

Overall, this book is geared to every academic writer, though by nature it is more geared towards several types of people:
1) people who lead academic writing workshops or offer support for academics
2) scholars who have taken it upon themselves to be leaders in social writing

I also think professors and consultants who organize writing retreats will benefit from Murray’s book, as well as faculty in their own institution who (like Joy Langston and now me) lead writing meetings. But overall, I think Writing in Social Spaces will help galvanize folks into making writing a social activity. Maybe my own undergrad and grad students will be motivated to develop a weekly writing meeting after reading Murray’s book or my thread/blog post on it.

I very strongly recommend Murray’s book, not only to writing retreat/meeting organizers but also to every faculty member. And potentially, undergraduate and graduate students too.

Posted in academia, reading notes, writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 21, 2020

How Writing Faculty Write: Strategies for Process, Product, and Productivity (my reading notes)

Around 2018, I started reading several books on “how to do a PhD, academic writing, and writing more generally. I did so to help my own doctoral students (by the way, you can read my “Reading Notes of Books on How To PhD” by clicking on the hyperlinked text)). Through time, I have developed a taste for buying and reading books on how to write, in hopes obviously of improving my own writing and that of my students.

Writing while at a hotel desk

Contrary to what most people think, I came to enjoy writing AFTER I had finished my undergraduate degree. I never thought I would enjoy writing, let alone publishing articles, books, chapters, etc. Eventually, most books on writing will converge to about the same idea(s), though every single one I have read will have something specific to contribute. That’s the case with Dr. Christine E. Tulley’s How Writing Faculty Write: Strategies for Process, Product, and Productivity.

AcWri while travelling

A very well written volume where Tulley explores the writing practices of 15 scholars in the rhetoric and composition field, the main ideas of this book will sound familiar to those who have read Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing, Hayot’s Elements of Academic Writing, Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, Warner’s The Writer’s Practice, Boice’s Professors as Writers, Single Boyle’s Demystifying Dissertation Writing, and Stephen King and Henry Miller on writing.

I do like Tulley’s book and I do think it’s worth the read because she does her analysis in a way that is innovative and refreshing. She includes the full interview after discerning patterns and writing lessons. In a way, Tulley’s exercise is much richer than Sword’s in Stylish Academic Writing precisely because she includes full interviews.

Whenever I write my reading notes of books on writing I feel as though I am in a strange position, particularly because by now I have read A TON of books on this topic. Also a ton of books on “how to PhD”. This exercise has been useful even for me as a scholar of comparative politics and public policy.

Writing while in Berlin

Do I glean new lessons from Tulley’s book? Most certainly I do. The book itself is good even if you want to teach qualitative methods because she reports like a qualitative methods text. However, by being very explicit about her methodology (following the Paris Review style of interviewing), I find that in a sense, Tulley’s book is richer than Sword. Particularly because of the direct attribution of quotes to specific authors/writers.

A few gems that I distilled from Tulley’s book include:

  • Writing faculty accept the challenges that writing poses, and push through.
  • Writing faculty enjoy process and product, and develop “workable” academic writing – that is, find ways to make writing enjoyable.
  • Writing faculty use outlining, scaffolding, thinking rhetorically and use invention strategy.
  • Writing faculty use “Quick Focus” strategies to push through writing projects during small blocks of time that they carve in their busy schedules/lives.

You can download the introduction and table of contents from the UUUP website (click here, will start download immediately)

Posted in academia, writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 20, 2020