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A few key (popular) blog posts for doctoral students

Someone on Twitter asked me for a “Popular Blog Posts” page or listing, but truth be told, I never know which post will be popular, so I figured I could store a thread I did a few months ago.

Reading and AcWri

These blog posts should be of interest to doctoral students but my resources can be used by undergraduates and graduates too.

And here is a partial list of Twitter IDs of scholars who provide great free public goods.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 4, 2019

Suggestions on qualitative research methods’ articles and books for graduate students

Anybody who has ever read my work knows that I’ve done a lot of research using qualitative methods (even though I consider myself a multi-method scholar). Anyhow, Dr. Yasemin Besen-Cassino requested suggestions of “cool journal articles/book chapters” that her qualitative research methods students’ might be interested in reading.

Reviewing the literature and mapping scholarship

Since we have a new Masters in Methods for Public Policy Analysis (CIDE METPOL) and I will be teaching a couple of courses there, I decided to turn my thread into a permanent blog post for people to refer to this one.

I know that I am as guilty of not providing full links to citations in some cases, but I was sleep-deprived. Though I personally prefer to offer suggestions with full citations and links to all PDFs.

This particular article by Dr. Carole McGranahan is amazing, on ethnographic sensibility and teaching it without fieldwork.

I also chose to embed a few suggestions that scholars provided on Dr. Besen-Cassino’s thread that had direct URLs and that I found interesting to read as well. See below.

I particularly love Dr. Zeynep Arsel’s work.

I love the work Dr. Daisy Verduzco Reyes does, and in particular this piece of hers involves doing qualitative work with communities of color (Hispanic/Latino)

I actually teach with Dr. Wolfinger’s article on field notes, see below.

On flexible coding:

In the future, I plan to write more about qualitative and experimental methods as well, both for my own students and for others.

Posted in academia, research, research methods.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 4, 2019

A discussion on time management, self-management, organization and routines, #BackToSchool edition

It’s September 1st,2019. For many students and faculty it’s Back-To-School Week and a flurry of pieces of advice on #AcademicTwitter are flowing through the interwebz. I’ve seen people recommend that they treat school like a 9-5 job, particularly PhD programmes. I actually agree with this view, provided that 9-5 represents the kind of routine that fits YOU.

Coordinating schedules

Since I wake up at 4 am in the morning, I can’t do that, personally, but others may. (Don’t you worry, I DO sleep properly, a decent 7.5 hours per cycle).

I was confronted with two challenges: I was on the verge of finishing my dissertation, so I needed to work 16 hour days because of all the rewrites, edits, etc. (I was working against a February 14, Valentine’s Day submission deadline). But I also loved my partner and wanted to sustain our relationship. My partner adapted to my schedule. We worked together to figure out a schedule that allowed me to finish writing and still maintain my sanity and avoid deteriorating our relationship. We saw each other more often (several times a week) for quick meals, walks along the beach, coffee/cinnamon buns (the best ones are still UBC’s SUB!), but for shorter periods of time.

Once I submitted my dissertation and started preparing for my defense, started looking for jobs, etc. I switched my routine to the now famous RPV “4am Ungodly O’Clock”. This allowed me to do work BEFORE my partner woke up, spend time once we both were awake, and continue working through the day. We both go to bed super early.

Even as a graduate student, I have always been very interested in people’s routines and in learning from them (I am, after all, a scholar of policy transfer, comparatie public policy and policy learning). I always observed whether/when people wrote at their desks or offices. I mention this because a lot of people can’t write on campus even if they have an assigned space (contingent faculty often don’t, and don’t even get me started on those structural conditions for failure). But I’ve seen professors at various universities who DO write on campus.

In the end, you and only you can carve the right time and space for your work, but I strongly believe that this should be part of a larger organizational system that includes self-care/sustaining activities (exercise, time with loved ones, rest, etc.) and work-related ones.

You may wonder “why would he give up some of his prime writing time up for planning?” Well, the answer is easy: because I need to prioritize what I need to get done and by when. The time I spend planning and prioritizing allows me to make less mistakes and re-orient my work. I’m an institutional theorist. I study how routines evolve into rules, norms, institution-building and institutional erosion. I just apply my theoretical background to my daily life.

Which is why I make my bed every single morning.

The reason why I start my day reviewing my daily goals.

Why I start my month reviewing my achievements and monthly goals.

This is what most of my students and RAs struggle with, and something that I actually enjoy: building routines that work for me. My daily routine includes doing work in the morning, then heading to campus. I get most of my writing done by the time I’m on campus. That’s because I lead a research group and a large, funded project and I know that most of my time on campus is going to be meetings (with students, faculty, staff, etc.)

I DO do research, reading and writing on campus.

But the vast majority of my thinking is done well before I’m on campus. Also, because of the 4 am wake up, I am basically done by the time I hit lunch. So I eat lunch (and then nap!).

Bottom line: I think students need to develop daily, weekly and monthly routines 4 themselves. Routines give structure. Something many students may need. Obviously you need to build “buffers” and contingency plans. Learning how to do that is another skill to master graduate school.

Life happens.

Posted in academia, planning.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 2, 2019

A modest proposal for desk organization

One of the most under-appreciated instruments of academic life is working space. I specifically think that desk spaces are fundamental to our scholarly work. Whenever I travel, what I appreciate the most is a hotel whose rooms have roomy, ample desks for me to write. The room size is somewhat irrelevant as long as I get enough working surface for everything I carry when I travel, and for me to comfortably write.

City Express Aeropuerto

Decently sized desk for a small hotel room.

As I said on Twitter, sometimes I write about things that some people find “too basic”. But truth be told, what some people consider “low level” may not be for someone else. I regularly get asked about how I organize my work (schedule, desk, workflow) on an everyday basis. That’s why I write about these topics on my blog (Planning, Workflow, Organization).

My basic rules for desk organization are as follows:

  • arrive to and leave a clean desk (on campus).
  • make piles of work in priority order (to my left).
  • review project/task prioritization on a regular basis.
  • when working from home, leave what I’m going to process in the morning already prepared the night before.
  • coffee, lots of coffee. And water.

Fletcher Hotel-Restaurant De Wageningsche Berg (Wageningen, The Netherlands)

Not my idea of a good working desk.

Holiday Inn Express Guadalajara ITESO (El Mante, Guadalajara)

Perhaps the best desk I’ve ever had in a hotel room.

This is my campus office:

My students, colleagues and campus visitors always tell me: “professor, you have the nicest office of all of CIDE!”. Which is a nice compliment to hear. But truth be told, I have made my working space welcoming because I spend so much of my life there!

This is my home office at my Mom’s:

This is my home office at my own house:

Again, my suggestions on desk arrangement:

  • Keep only the stuff that you need as you write on a particular task/work packet
  • At the end of the day, leave an organized/cleared/uncluttered desk for you to arrive the next day.
  • Clear stuff in one direction (I usually clear stuff to the right and I maintain materials that support the work I’m doing to my left. I’m right handed)
  • Make your desk space, your office space and your routines, your own.

Hopefully this blog post will be of use to some people who like discussing organization!

Posted in academia, organization, productivity.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 2, 2019

Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials (my reading notes)

When I first purchased Andrew Abbott’s “Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials” I did not realize he was a sociologist of knowledge, which is why my comment on his ethnographic approach (below, on my Twitter thread) is ill-informed. I recently read an interview with him about Digital Paper (“Andrew Abbott on brute-force research, the future of libraries, and what makes good research good”) which made me reconsider and actually search for my Twitter thread and publish it in long-form blog post so that people can refer to it.

I should disclose that I work with a lot of the material that Abbott uses: I am a library lover and I use a lot of textual material from archival, interview and other primary and secondary sources. So, for me and my own students, Digital Paper is a good book to have, read up on and refer to.

Bottom line: this book is really good, and worth using to teach research design, research paradigms or methods, overall. This is a great review of Digital Paper by Professor Alex Golub. I don’t know if I would call Digital Paper The Best Research Book EVAR but I think it IS fantastic. Particularly for those of us who work with textual data.

Posted in academia.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – September 1, 2019

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (Adler/Van Doren) – my reading notes

I am very much on record with my view that books should be read in-depth, and that skimming is an important strategy out of a broad repertoire of reading heuristics. Although, I’ll admit that after reading “How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading” by Adler and Van Doren, my priors have been updated. I don’t think I can say the same thing that I used to say before: teach people to read in-depth before skimming. I think one can use Adler and Van Doren’s Levels of Reading as sequencing heuristics to teach various strategies. You can read an excerpt from the book here, specifically the table of contents.

Acwri books

That said, I still insist that we ought to avoid teaching students to ONLY skim. OF COURSE, we also need to learn and teach how to triage our reading workload, too. It’s equally problematic to insist that they ONLY read in-depth. I think we ought to provide them with a broad range of reading strategies (which is why I write so often about the topic – also in hopes to help my students develop these skills).

Someone on Twitter, I can’t recall whom, asked me if I had ever read Adler and Van Doren’s book. Well, no, I hadn’t. So I made some time last night to go through it. As I’ve noted before, I am an extremely fast reader, so I could absorb the entire 350 pages in a very short period of time. I wrote a Twitter thread summarizing my reading notes from the book.

First off: it’s a HUGE book. On how to read books. YIKES.

The above said, it IS a great book.

So, you may ask me: “professor Pacheco-Vega, what’s the strategy then to use Adler and Van Doren?”. Well, grad you asked.

This is the strategy *I* plan to use with my graduate students (remember, they’re all Spanish-speakers, who have learned English as a second language)

For graduate students

1) Give a 1 lecture summary of the entire book, maybe in a workshop format.
2) Produce a Coles’ Notes summary and,
3) Give my students my Coles’ Notes, have them read them, then have them read AVD up until the “reading different types of material” chapter (16, I think?)
4) Have THEM write Synthetic Notes of each chapter (to note, I won’t let them do AIC skim reads. These synthetic notes should be mini-memorandums on ADV).

What would be my strategy for undergraduates?

Most institutions (at least mine does) have an “Argumentative Writing” course. What I plan to do is tell the professor about this book, and suggest that they replicate my strategy up (1 and 2) but then assign a chapter per week.

Bottom line: like Adler and Van Doren, we need to teach different levels of reading and various types of strategies to achieve our own learning goals and those of our students. 10/10 do recommend.

Posted in academia, reading strategies.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 31, 2019

“From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read” – (my reading notes)

One of the things I realized as I was going through my Resources pages and more specifically, my Reading Notes of Books I have Read is that I have not tweeted nor blogged enough about methods. This makes me feel particularly bad because well, I am a methods guy. So I figured I’d write about a book that masterfully blends two of my major interests: writing AND ethnography.

As I said in my Twitter thread, “From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read” by Dr. Kristen Ghodsee is an absolute masterpiece. I will be using this book to teach how to write ethnography. Of course, I would very strongly encourage you to read my editorial in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods too, if like me, you are interested in teaching writing in the social sciences, and/or ethnographic methods: Writing Field Notes and Using Them to Prompt Scholarly Writing”

Writing setup at home

My Twitter thread offers my reading notes of Ghodsee. First I offered some context on my background as an ethnographer.

Then I discussed why I love Ghodsee’s book.

Bottom line: when I teach Ethnographic Methods next I’ll be using Ghodsee as one of the key texts. I do very strongly recommend that you read it. And while I may put her on the spot, Dr. Robin Nagle wrote one of the most compelling ethnographies I have ever read in my life.

Then, I offered a couple of reflections on doing (and writing) ethnography of vulnerable communities, a topic Dr. Kate Parizeau and I have published about.

Hopefully my reading notes will be of use to those interested in improving their writing of fieldwork and ethnographic material.

Posted in academia.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 29, 2019

Henry Miller on Writing (my reading notes)

Henry Miller (the writer) is widely regarded for his avant garde approach to writing, particularly about s3x. Many people on the internet share his 11 commandments of writing. But Miller had much, much more to say about writing, as Thomas M. Moore shows in his Henry Miller on Writing published by New Directions Books.

AcWri highlighting and scribbling while on airplanes

I tweeted my reading notes of the book, which are now stored in this blog post for posterity.

Repertoires are important. You can’t dance or sing or play all things in the book. I am NOT prepared to dance everything. I can dance salsa very, very competitively, merengue so-and-so, tango I can do one or two pieces well, and the rest, well, not in my realm. Same with piano. I have my repertoire (a couple things from Manuel M. Ponce, Beethoven, Chopin). Methodologically, I have a repertoire of techniques too (spatial, qualitative, quantitative, social network analysis). And organizationally, we should also have a repertoire of programs.

Some days/mornings/evenings you work on assembling data and analyzing, other days you nap.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 29, 2019

Preparing for comprehensive-qualifying exams: Seeking guidance and practicing through sample questions

I wrote a previous blog post on how I prepared for my doctoral programme’s comprehensive exams. I did my PhD at The University of British Columbia, in Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada). Their graduate office has a very clearly written set of guidelines for comprehensive exams, but in the end, I strongly believe that it is each unit/faculty/department/doctoral committee that ends up generating the exact format in consultation with the student.

Reading highlighting scribbling and Everything Notebook

As I noted on my Twitter thread, I was very naive in the way I approached my comprehensive exams, and while I did ask for guidance, it wasn’t enough to prepare me for what was coming. So this morning, while reflecting on the question, I wrote a Twitter thread providing a few ideas to prepare for comprehensive exams.

Personaly, I absolutely loved preparing for my comprehensive exams.. For an entire year, I read what I loved studying and I spent time literally reading and writing (you’ve probably read my extensive rants on the importance of legitimising reading as part of the academic enterprise). But I understand why the process is stressful. Not knowing what to expect is something that makes preparing for qualifying/comprehensive exams extraordinarily hard.

KEY PIECES OF ADVICE ON PREPARING FOR COMPREHENSIVE/QUALIFYING EXAMS:
Now that I had time to reflect on this, here are a few suggestions:

Reading and #AcWri on the plane

I want to re-emphasize what I said in my Twitter thread but now on the blog post:

ASK FOR GUIDANCE. ASK QUESTIONS.

Asking questions is better than going into a comprehensive exam without knowing exactly what to expect and how to approach them.

Something that I’ve realized is that Masters programs may also have comprehensive examinations.

Hopefully this blog post and the linked resources will be useful to those who are in the throes of starting their preparation for these exams.

Posted in academia, research.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 26, 2019

From review of the literature to mind map of the field

In a previous blog post, I explained how, after having done all the reading, I plot the literature (yes, by hand and doing mind mapping techniques) and then, based on this map, I write full paragraphs of the literature review. In this short blog post, I reverse my approach, and instead I show how you can map the literature and discern major research themes, trends and topics based on the paragraphs coming from a literature review. I will use Nielsen et al 2019 again on the politics of plastics as an example.

Mind-mapping and writing

My Twitter thread shows step-by-step how I go about this mapping process.

As anybody who reads my blog can tell, I LOVE mind maps. Mind-mapping is an extremely powerful technique to study, review the literature and write. There’s plenty of free software out there to create solid mind maps (I tried LucidChart and MindMapUp) or you can write them by hand, with colours, as I do.

Posted in academia, reading strategies, research, writing.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 25, 2019