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On the importance of rest and recuperation (R&R) over the holidays

I won’t tell anyone what to do, but as I close out a terrible year, health-wise, I want to share a reflection regarding MY OWN EXPERIENCE with overwork. I think everyone can do whatever they prefer, I’m just using my experience to reflect on the profound inequalities and inequities of the higher education system and academia in general as it stands now (much as it has improved over the last few years).

Hotel San Trópico (Marina Vallarta, Puerto Vallarta, México)

Photo of me on holidays in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, a couple of Decembers ago

My reflective Twitter thread started like this:

I have A LOT of experience with overwork. I was brought up as an overachiever. My life as a child was pretty regimented and (because 2 of my grandparents were in the military), quasi-militarized. I do not regret my upbringing and I’m grateful to my parents that they did this. I grew up expecting to balance and juggle a full-time school load, piano lessons, swimming lessons, and volunteering teaching adults how to read and write in gang-riddled neighbourhoods. I switched piano for theatre and competitive dancing (note I didn’t just dance, I COMPETED).

I switched from swimming and basketball to volleyball. I THRIVED while playing volleyball, and trained 4 hours every single day. I reached juniors national-level competitive team-status and travelled the country and abroad to play tournaments. All of this, while balancing school.

To me, my friends and my social life were irreplaceable, so I balanced competitive volleyball, competitive dancing, volunteering, a full-time school load (chemical engineering, which isn’t an “easy’ undergraduate degree) with having a social life, friends and a close-knit family. I have plenty of experience with big workloads and the challenges of juggling activities trying to keep a semblance of balance. I had tough and rigorous professors, and I do not regret having faced these challenges at all whatsoever.

HOWEVER…

When I entered grad school, more specifically my PhD, I felt that trying to manage the workload was like drinking water through a straw that was coming from a firehose. I am 5’11 and often felt that my workload was like 7 feet tall.

I frequently felt like I was drowning. LITERALLY

Note, I DO have special skillS. I speed-read, I touch-type over 100 words per minute, and I have quasi-eidetic memory. To me, preparing for comprehensive exams was a total breeze, and when I defended my doctoral dissertation, I basically hit the ball out of the park.

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega at CIGA-UNAM (Morelia)

Me giving a talk at UNAM in 2014. This is one of the things I love doing the most.

But even with those skills, I STRUGGLED. When I transitioned to being a professor, I reflected on the fact that even with my skills and extended experience being a systematic planner, I WAS STRUGGLING, I thought to myself: “what happens with everyone else who doesn’t have the privileges that I do? How much do THEY struggle?”

Being in a highly competitive environment drives up self-imposed excessive workloads. In graduate school I started getting tired regularly (despite playing competitive volleyball on a regular basis too), and this has followed me through my professor career.

THIS WAS NOT, AND IS NOT NORMAL.

I’m ok with being competitive, working hard, but I also like playing hard and more than anything, RESTING HARD. I regularly face this challenge of having a fulfilling academic career all the while trying to achieve some semblance of balance. I’ve written about this since 2013 (you can check my posts below).

2018 brought a really bad chronic pain episode, and 2019 started with a similar case. My first 2019 pain-free-day was February 15th, 2019. Over the second semester of 2019, I developed a terrible case of psoriasis/eczema/dermatitis combined with chronic fatigue/chronic pain. I am grateful that for the most part, I lived in Paris with relatively low-levels of pain, or pain-free (for the last few months of my visiting professorship at Sorbonne Nouvelle’s Institute D’Etudes D’Amerique Latine”). Because at least, I got extended periods of time to THINK.

I know for a fact from my experience this year that chronic pain, chronic fatigue and dermatitis all have impeded my scholarly performance. What I could accomplish with my full capacities, I did from February 15, 2019 to September 15, 2019 (which is when my dishydrotic eczema manifested itself alongside the chronic fatigue).

I understand that many of you may need SOME time to catch up with the accumulated workload you have. I had to do it too. FINE. I still suggest that you ought to take at least a few days off, in the way “off” is important to you (I can’t stop reading scholarly literature, so “time off” = “reading a nerdy book at a leisurely pace”). In closing:

As I was writing my thread I came across an important addendum: I am well aware of the fact that contingent faculty may be forced to overwork precisely because of the very nature of their labour precariousness. This is why academics’ wellness should be also higher education organizations’ responsibility. It’s a structural issue. We can’t let academic institutions off the hook without taking responsibility of the well-being of staff, faculty and students.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 28, 2019

On the importance of teaching robust work using qualitative methods in the social sciences

One of my biggest pet peeves is how we end up rehashing discussions all the time about the same topics. I feel forced to write Twitter threads and blog posts about the validity, rigor and importance of qualitative research on a regular basis, particularly because for some scholars, qualitative work appears to be considered “easy”. The relatively recent popularity of quantitative and experimental approaches in political science combined with an apparent belief that qualitative research is less relevant/rigorous/well done than quantitative work seem to be two factors that influence uptake and popularity of qualitative research methods in political science.

Mazapil - Concepcion del Oro - Salaverna - Fieldwork June 8 2018

Photo from one of my trips doing ethnographic fieldwork in Zacatecas, Mexico, over the summer of 2018.

A recent article in PS: Politics titled Graduate Qualitative Methods Training in Political Science: A Disciplinary Crisis by Cassandra Emmons and Andrew Moravcsik reports that there appears to be a dearth of training in qualitative methods in the political science field at many universities. I really don’t have much time to discuss it in detail so both this post and my Twitter thread only discuss two aspects of the debate: the importance of teaching qualitative methods and of publishing good qualitative work.

I admit that I DO have a stake in the development of qualitative methods as a field.

My Twitter thread draws from my experience here in Mexico. While I do field research all over the world, I do have a lot of work that focuses on Mexico, and as a result, I need to read scholarship in the Spanish language. In my experience reading a lot of the Spanish-language stuff that is being published in Mexico (and A TON of what’s published in English worldwide), it seems to me as though people are teaching that “qualitative methods is everything that is not quantitative methods”.

WRONG.

The conversation on research methods and qualitative vs. quantitative is far from over, and I am hoping this blog post will contribute to the discussion too.

Posted in academia, qualitative methods, research, research methods.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 27, 2019

On the importance of cultivating a network of friends and colleagues OUTSIDE of academia

I have had a very diverse life and with that, I have developed various networks of friends who do NOT work at all in academia. These friends and colleagues have enriched my life enormously.

Rebecca, John, Ryan, Tanya and myself

John, Rebecca, Ryan, Tanya and myself when I was in graduate school. All of them worked in the tech industry, while I was studying my PhD.

One of the reasons why I have never feared the tenure process outcomes is precisely the broad range of activities I have developed in my previous lives and the extensive and diverse network of networks I have. I am lucky to have friends and colleagues in many industries, and because of my interdisciplinary training and work experiences in government, industry, consulting, academia and business, I can do a lot more than being a professor.

I myself have done a number of different things. I have waited tables, served coffee, managed an office, danced and modeled professionally, designed marketing campaigns and blogger relations programmes. I have done public relations and media training work. I have advised startups. I was my parents’ assistants when they were lawyers (my Mom decided to leave law behind, did a PhD in Spain at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and became a professor of political science).

Having friends of very diverse backgrounds and doing different things myself, (working as a chemical engineer in a plant, working in government as an advisor and within the bureaucracy, tutoring and teaching disadvantaged and marginalized adults some basic literacy skills) has expanded my world from the narrower academic field.

I can do A LOT MORE.

I have worked as a management consultant, as a website programmer, and I have a super strong network of friends in extremely diverse fields. I love being a professor, don’t get me wrong, and I’m very good at it, but I don’t necessarily need to stay in academia. I have plenty other options.

Having friends with diverse backgrounds and engaging in other professional activities not directly related to academia has made me a lot leas worried and wary about a turbulent job market. Because I can do a lot of things beyond being a professor. That’s greatly thanks to having friends who work outside of academia.

Moral of the story: cultivate a network of people who are WITHIN academia AND a network of people who are OUTSIDE academia.

Both are very important.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 27, 2019

Project management for academics I: Managing a research pipeline

I am always honored when fellow scholars mention my name as someone worthy of being followed for advice on planning.

I am a very systematic planner and I love having my life neatly organized and planned (I am a Virgo, a Type A and an Upholder).

Drafts monthly plans

While I have taken Masters-level project management courses and have read the entire Project Management Institute PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), I have a very particular set of processes that work for me, and sometimes, work for other folks.

The one question I saw on Twitter today regarding how to do research planning prompted me to curate a list of resources and scholars whose research pipeline processes might be of help for anybody who follows me or reads my blog. Here is my Twitter thread.

While this thread was about project management, I had to discuss something equally important: if you are the principal investigator of a laboratory, or you use the lab model to engage your students and research assistants, you can’t develop your own research pipeline without consulting others. Each member of the team’s research pipeline needs to align with that of the principal investigator, and vice-versa.

A few respondents offered their own advice on research pipeline management and I link to their responses in my thread.

Overall, I do hope that this thread and blog post will be useful to scholars as they plan their research pipeline! Also grateful to every scholar I quoted here for sharing their processes.

Posted in academia, planning, productivity, research.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 19, 2019

Analysing and teaching theoretical debates using a set of articles in Point-Counter Point-Rejoinder format

One of the things I find most challenging to teach is the skill necessary to map out scholarly debates. I find that most professors offer a list of articles, book chapters and books that (in theory) map the field as they see it. However, I find that very few if any provide any guidance on to how to understand an entire field or sub-field of scholarship through scholarly exchanges and conversations. In this blog post I show how we can teach theoretical debates using a set of articles in Point-Counter Point-Rejoinder format (PCR).

Reading highlighting scribbling

I strongly believe we ought to teach our students how to map out scholarly debates. It’s on us, rather than on them, to show them the road map: who says what in the field, who says the opposite thing (or a counter point), and is the balance of evidence supporting Theory A or Theory B or neither?

To be perfectly frank, I DO think that within a course, faculty owe it to students to draw the map of the literature rather than asking of the student to make sense of all scholarly work and create the map themselves. HOWEVER, I strongly believe that for comprehensive/qualifying/preliminary exams, students SHOULD be able to map out the debates themselves.

Beyond the corruption theory Point-Counterpoint-Rejoinder set of articles I show above, I found another set that discusses environmental justice.

Now, so far I have only provided two sets of articles in PCR format. I draw from one of these sets to showcase how to write the argumentation in a Point-Counterpoint-Rejoinder kind of way.

I also believe it is important to teach our students how to write critiques that are firm but courteous. They should also be able to highlight their own contributions without destroying the scholarship of people who came before them.

Hopefully this blog post will be of use to those of you who want to teach strategies to map out the literature using scholarly exchanges as examples.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 10, 2019

Teaching proper citation practices: avoiding “Daisy chains” and grandparented cites when doing citation tracing

I have written a lot about how to do proper citation tracing (both forward and backward) to search who has cited whom and facilitate proper attribution of ideas.

I am a fan of always going back to the original source.

And I know grandparenting citations is often the result of not being able to go back to the original source.

Robust and ethical citation practices are an important part of what we do as scholarly writers. I am not a fan of what I used to call grandfathered citations

This is an example of a grandparented citation:”As Pacheco-Vega argues (2010, p. 874, in Gomez-Alvarez 2013, p. 30)…” I understand that historians will push back against my dislike of grandparented citations, but as noted by several scholars elsewhere (and in the paper I link below), there is a high risk that you’ll end up quoting someone saying something they did not intend to say.

Dr. Harrison, Dr. Academic Batgirl and I aren’t the only one concerned with Daisy chains and grandparented citations. See Patronek et al (2016) “Who is minding the bibliography? Daisy chaining, dropped leads, and other bad behavior using examples from the dog bite literature”

I think grandparented citations should be only valid when it’s really next to impossible to find the original source. Thoughts?

Posted in academia.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 5, 2019

Prioritizing work and the TOMs/TOTOs hierarchy

One of my biggest problems, as I have openly said everywhere, is that I often prioritize other people over myself. This is partly because I’m overly generous by nature, partly because I also know that helping others will come to me naturally, whereas sometimes tackling my own work is hard and difficult.

Writing while in Berlin

One of the tricks I use to force myself to prioritize my own work and well being before others is using the TOMs/TOTOs hierarchy.

As I said on Twitter, for my #2ThingsADay I focus on TOMs, and when I get to campus, I work on the TOTOs – this may sound selfish, but seriously if I don’t carve time for my own writing, I simply work on stuff that I owe to other people and I never focus on my own writing.

You may want to consider start prioritizing your TOMs.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 1, 2019

Making your research “dialogue” with other scholars’ in your literature review

One of the biggest challenges I find when reviewing the work of my graduate students is that their work is often not situated within the broader landscape of scholarly literature. They have made an important contribution, but it does not show clearly in their writing.

Offices (campus, home and my Mom's)

I tell them “you need to put your research into dialogue with other scholars’ work”. In this blog post I explain what I mean by that.

An important step in the process of making your work “dialogue” with others’ is drawing connections. This is why I say that we need to read broadly and deeply: to be able to connect a particular idea with that of other scholars you need to know what they said and where. This is why the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) is important: you can search the Excel file for a particular idea or concept that may seem relevant and related to the one presented in the paper you are reading. You can obviously do the same if you store your articles and books in PDF format in Mendeley (or Zotero, or EndNote, or Citavi, or Refworks). The ability to search can’t be overstated.

In the particular case I analyzed in my thread, I linked to the work of 3 scholars whose work I admire and who have studied the case of the water crisis in Flint: Benjamin Pauli, Ashley Nickels and Malini Ranganathan. Because I do recall their work, I can connect ideas from the article I’m reading to their published research, as I show below. I drew a quick mind map to show how their work connects to that of Moors’ (2019).

This mind map only links 3 ideas and 3 authors, but of these, perhaps the most relevant is the reframing of Flint as a vibrant city. That’s the core idea Moors is putting forth: that social media enabled Flint residents to tell the world their story from their perspective.

CIDE office desk at work

I haven’t written a memo derived from these notes, but it’s clear to me that I could (and probably should), and that I could/should cite Ben, Malini and Ashley’s work when I revise my R&R.

At any rate, THIS is what I mean by “making your work dialogue with that of other authors” – being able to connect core ideas from an author to those of others. Hopefully this blog post will help those writing their Literature Reviews

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 30, 2019

Writing your literature review based on the “Cross-Reference” column of the Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED)

Earlier this year, I was invited to Memorial University of Newfoundland (in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada) as the George M. Story Distinguished Lecturer (thanks to Drs. Amanda Bittner and Arn Keeling who successfully submitted an application for and won a grant to bring me to MUN).

Literature review

I gave a public lecture, a research talks and a couple of workshops for graduate students. As I was preparing the one on academic writing, I got an insight that I hadn’t realized when presenting earlier versions of this talk: you can, if you want, write your literature review based on the “Cross-Reference” column of my Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED).

Note how the paragraph above the purple highlight and the next one actually discuss how different scholars have argued about the variability in degree of precarity across waste pickers’ case studies. THAT is the kind of stuff I would write in my “Cross-Reference” column.

Basically, once you’ve surveyed the field, your “Cross-Reference” column gives you the foundations to start writing the literature review, because it allows you to see how the work you’re reading is connected with your own and with others’ scholarship.

Hopefully this blog post will help those who use my CSED method to write their literature reviews.

Posted in academia, writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 13, 2019

On skimming reading material and the importance of The Second Round of in-depth reading

One of my main concerns when I see students seek advice online, as I’ve made explicit in earlier blog posts of mine, is that many folks recommend that they should ALWAYS SKIM EVERYTHING and later (at some undetermined point in time) they should choose which readings they must come back to and read in more depth. As I’ve said repeatedly, students and scholars alike should develop a broad repertoire of reading strategies. There is no magic bullet, and there are risks to the ALWAYS SKIM strategy which I outlined in a Twitter thread earlier this week.

Reading writing working

I have read a ton of my fellow professors encourage students to “just skim and when you find the right article/book, THEN you can read in more depth”. I would be down with this strategy if students were used to reading in depth throughout their studies. I am not certain they are. There is a lot of heterogeneity in reading speeds/material density but also on the purpose of said reading materials. For example, in my class, I always tell my students: “this lecture will ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE that you read very much in depth article A, B and C. Skim D if need be”.

Example: if it’s a class on foundations of institutional theory, I can easily tell my students: “read Ostrom 1990 Ch 3 in depth, North 1990 Ch1 in depth, and Hall and Taylor 1996 – from H&T you should totally do a synthetic note that includes a table on 3 neoinstitutionalisms”. People who teach institutional theory may frown at the fact I didn’t include Williamson. Personally, I believe one can learn institutions with Ostrom, North, Hall and Taylor. THEN go in more depth with Williamson. Anyhow, this is just an example of guidance I offer my students.

I really do hope that folks in higher education will take to heart the message that if you teach your students to strategically choose and skim, you should also teach them to do The Second Round of in-depth reading.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 13, 2019