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Flint, Mexico and the dangerous, slippery slope from tap water to bottled water

I have been following the tragedy of Flint (Michigan, USA) water residents’ struggles with their municipal tap water supply ever since it started. It’s perhaps the only instance of water problems that I know of in recent years that has been taken as relevant and seriously as climate change. As my own research has shown, environmental activism manages to shine light on complex issues more robustly and visibly whenever human health issues are concerned, and in this case, the Flint water crisis has prolonged for over 2.5 years.

Bottled water in Madrid

I recently read (in the news) that even as water quality levels improve, Flint residents still choose bottled water over tap water. As I mentioned on Twitter, this is the textbook model of how bottled water companies sustain their leadership in public water provision. Like the Mexican case, one I have been researching for a few years now, fear of the tap and distrust in the municipal water utility to supply high quality water are two major factors why people shift from drinking water from the tap to purchasing bottled water.

In a 2009 paper in the journal Society and Natural Resources, Dr. Yael Parag and Dr. Timmons Roberts discussed this fear of the tap, a phenomenon that I myself have observed replicated in the Mexican case. I have conducted extensive fieldwork in many municipalities across the country, one of my students wrote her Masters’ thesis on the stories around bottled water in Mexico, and another of my students did his Masters’ thesis on a non-parametric, snowball sampling survey of reasons why Mexican consumers drink bottled water. All of our data and conclusions point to the same reason: Mexican people don’t trust their municipal water utilities to provide them with safe drinking water.

Bottled water on campus

And as my research has shown (and Dr. Andrew Szasz’ inverse quarantine theory also confirms), when it comes to their own health and the food and drinks they consume, individuals are extraordinarily risk averse. This risk aversion (combined with local water utilities’ weakening and poor infrastructure in some cases) is something that bottling water companies exploit to convince the consumer of the safety of their own product.

Until we have strong municipalities with financially and technically robust water utilities, with the capacity to supply safe water, bottled water companies will continue to win the battle and commodify the human right to water. This is a dangerous scenario, because Mexico went from drinking basically no packaged water to becoming the world’s global per-capita consumer of bottled water in less than 30 years. Is this really the pathway that other countries want to take?

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 16, 2016

New publication: The Environment (book chapter in International Relations)

chapterLast year, I was invited by Robert Oprisko to participate in a collective effort book led by him and Stephen McGlinchey that would map the field of international relations from a perspective of “Day One” (that is, someone who has never taken a course in international relations). Given my expertise in global environmental politics, Robert and Stephen asked me to write the environmental chapter. I’m very proud to join my friend Dr. David Hornsby (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) and many other excellent scholars. The final version is much shorter than the version I wrote originally (which had tables and figures and included reference to two important datasets.

The first is a dataset on global constitutional environmental rights produced by Dr. Josh Gellers at University of North Florida and the second is a dataset on global environmental summits generated by Dr. Kate O’Neill from University of California Berkeley).

But still I think it’s a very fun read and I’m proud to contribute to teaching the next generation of international relations scholars. The book is Open Access and is entirely downloadable here, and my chapter starts on page 165. Enjoy!

Raul Pacheco-Vega (2017) “The Environment” In: Stephen McGlinchey (Ed.) “International Relations“. E-International Relations Publishing, Bristol, England. pp. 165-173

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 10, 2016

Processing a Paper Protocol – from PDF to memo

Clean office with new couchWhen people visit my campus office, they often admire the fact that I have a systematically organized library where my books and printed articles/book chapters/reports are all available (and ordered alphabetically, in the case of printouts, and by topic, in the case of books). For me, “processing” articles and books/book chapters is a systematic process that enables me to know where to find which piece of research. Thus “processing” entails finding the digital version, saving it, reading it, and then organizing it. I do this to avoid what Pat Thomson calls “PDF alibi”, that is, thinking that I have already processed an article or a book chapter when I simply downloaded it and stored it and I did not read it. Since I integrate reading with my academic writing, I am rarely victim of PDF alibi syndrome. But I have often said, I’m definitely not above doing long stretches of reading, particularly when I am preparing a literature review for a paper.

For me, processing a paper (or a piece of work) entails the following stages: First, I give it a very quick read. Then, I decide if this piece requires deeper engagement with it, be it through highlighting and scribbling on the margins, be it by writing a rhetorical precis, or be it by preparing a detailed memorandum.

Often times, the bunch of printed output that I need to process comes from a detailed citation tracing search. I am currently writing a literature review on the human right to water, so I had to catch up on everything that has been published since I last did one (e.g. in the last four months).

The process is as I’ve shown above: I download the PDF using Last Name, Year and Title of the document. I organize each file in a folder (I do have a folder for PDFs “To Be Organized”). I also print it out and sort it as indicated above (and in this post). I also upload the PDF on to my Mendeley database and clean up the reference.

I'm not convinced about reading on Mendeley.

When the paper is relevant but I don’t think I have the time to prepare a detailed memorandum, I simply write a rhetorical precis that I can then type and digitize and add into my Evernote library. This makes my database of rhetorical precis searchable and findable. I also save the file into my Dropbox in the folder for the paper I am currently writing.

When I have a good number of articles that are worth memo-ing, I dump the memorandum (or at least, the most relevant quotations) into my Excel conceptual synthesis worksheet. Even if I only write a rhetorical precis, I always keep it also in the literature review Excel worksheet, so that I know which articles to refer back to.

Often times, I’ll scribble notes in my Everything Notebook that are related to a specific piece of printed work. When that happens, I use the last name of the author and the year to prepare a plastic tab and use that tab to separate my scribbles on the Everything Notebook (and to ensure that I can find my notes easily!)

Again, the point of this post is: NEVER FILE A PAPER UNTIL YOU’VE READ IT.

In my case, I never file something until I’ve processed it. Hopefully my method is useful to you!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – December 5, 2016

Project Planning Protocol – From idea to paper in one swift sequence

A few months back, Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom (assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and someone I consider a dear friend) tweeted she was looking forward to organizing her academic life using the methods I’ve posted on my blog on the topic of Organization and Time Management. She called them “Get Your Life Together Academic Protocols”

People have asked me frequently if I have a series of posts that could help them from an idea to a paper, to managing their everyday academic and personal lives. The most recent request I received was from Glen Wright, from Academia Obscura fame.

I decided to post the sequence of blog posts I already have written that I think make most sense for someone to get organized using my methods.

Here are the 9 posts in tweet format. I posted them this way in case you want to retweet a specific one (clicking on the retweet icon will launch the Twitter page and enable you to retweet that specific post).

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 16, 2016

On getting a good night of sleep and the biphasic 6 + 1.5 hours cycle

I was recently asked by Chris Birdsall on Twitter how my sleep cycle works.

This question came about, I believe, because (a) I appear to be on Twitter all the time (which I’m not, read my post on my Twitter strategies) and (b) I appear like I don’t sleep at all (I actually love sleeping and naps, generally speaking).

This is a myth.

I sleep 7.5 hours per day which is about what just about any person should sleep (please exclude parents and those suffering from chronic insomnia). Yes, I wake up at 4am to write, but trust me, I do love me some sleep. There are people who have attempted polyphasic sleep cycles (where they take naps in between long periods of work). Honestly, after having tried it during my PhD (and failed miserably), I don’t believe in polyphasic sleep cycles.

The thing is, I DO believe in the biphasic model.

Remember, I’m not a sleep expert (though I DO know someone who IS). So, I am just sharing my experience and what I read before deciding on my current sleep cycle model. I had read somewhere that for someone to experience actual rest, they had to achieve deep sleep, and that being rested meant that we got several deep sleep cycles where each one of these lasts 90 minutes.

To calculate how much sleep I should get, I calculated the following: 1.5 hours times 4 is six hours, what some consider is the least amount of sleep you can get before suffering damage in your cognitive functions. Though apparently, sleeping more than seven hours may be non-optimal.

So I normally sleep 6 hours at night, and then I have a 1.5 hour nap at the “end of my day” (e.g. when I teach, this is normally at 3pm). Because I start working at 4 am, by noon I’m done with the day, and by 2:30pm I’m really exhausted. So I drive home and take a 90 minute nap, which usually leaves me recharged to do more stuff in the afternoon or evening. This also allows me to have some semblance of a social life, where my friends LOVE going out until 10pm (which is a total NO NO for me).

I try really hard to be in bed by 9pm so that if there’s some delay in how fast I fall asleep, I can be fully asleep by 10pm. Then, waking up at 4am is natural. My body is used to it. I’m also used to having a nap at 3pm or so. On weekends, I try as hard as I can to take as many naps as my body requires. During the week I only need one per day, but on weekends, for some reason, I need more sleep and I try hard to take as many naps as possible.

Sleeping well is a well-tried tool to improve academic performance, trust me (and the experts!)

My friend Melonie Fullick, who DOES study higher education, agrees that we need enough sleep.

I recognize that academic parents with toddlers and little children and scholarly people with chronic insomnia have a harder time to get enough sleep. I just hope we all could get enough sleep. It would make our academic lives much better. It’s dangerous and unhealthy to cheat ourselves of sleep.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 12, 2016

Getting writing done as a motivator to write more

Right now, as of November 11th, 2016, I have two journal articles under review, 3 accepted with changes, two book chapters in press, and I’m in the process of submitting one book chapter and two more articles that are ready for (thanks, #GetYourManuscriptOut and #AcWriMo for the additional motivation!). Strangely enough, I am really fired up to write more, even though I’m not doing AcWriMo.

#AcWri on the plane from Dallas to Leon

I am not 100% sure if my theory has any empirical evidence to back it up, but I have a hunch that getting writing done is an actual motivator to write more. Knowing that my stuff is out and that I’m crossing stuff off of my list is actually making me want to write, and to do more research. It may also be the fact that it’s the end of the year (or the end of the world as we know it, as of November 8th, 2016).

I also think my willingness to write more may also be correlated with the fact that the year (the actual year, not the academic one!) is ending, so I think I also want to have my work out for review. That’s the best advice I have ever gotten: to get my stuff out, and to have it reviewed and read.

My office at CIDE Region Centro during and after writing a paper

My biggest frustration with myself has always been that I’m too much of a perfectionist, so sometimes putting words on paper worries me because I don’t know if they’re perfect of not. But as I’ve tweeted recently, the best advice I ever got was “get your stuff out for review”. And exactly that’s how the #GetYourManuscriptOut hashtag emerged.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 11, 2016

On doing the grunt work in academia

While I have pushed for reflection and slow scholarship in my blog, I have to admit that some of the less romantic and glamorous parts of academia don’t particularly excite me. I call that “the grunt work“.

Like many people in my profession (academia), I find it hard to motivate myself. Even with my own tricks and “hacks”, where I convince my brain that I can knock off a few Quick Wins by finishing simpler tasks in blocks of 30 minutes, where I do granular planning and break down each component of a project into thirds (the Rule of Three method), even though I focus on just ONE task at a time, it’s hard for me to get motivation. And doing the grunt work doesn’t excite me either.

Even worse, sometimes, writing IS grunt work, as writer Jodi Picoult emphasizes.

Writing memoranda, rhetorical precis and extracting quotations to fill your Excel conceptual synthesis dump sheet? Grunt work.

#Memorandum #AcWri

I would LOVE to say that as soon as I turn on my laptop, Word immediately launches and I can start typing sentences that are coherent, and that I write for 2 hours and that life is good and I have a solid 2,500 words by the end of my morning session. This isn’t the case.

Let me tell you a little story, just from the past couple of days. I am coauthoring a book chapter with a colleague in Germany. To work on this chapter, I needed to do the following:

  • Print out his email to me, and the chapter draft he sent me.
  • Read my coauthor’s requests and map out in my Drafts Review Matrix what I was going to do.
  • Start going through the table, all the while deciding what I could realistically finish in the time I was allocating for the edition of this chapter.
  • Search Mendeley for the right references I needed to insert to back up my argument.
  • Since I am not the lead author on this particular chapter, I had to make sure to insert the references and then create a bibliography from where he could copy the references he needed (he uses EndNote and I use Mendeley, which can make coauthoring a bit complicated).
  • Type an email responding with the changes I made.

Of the list of activities I show above, only ONE would count ordinarily as “writing” (e.g. producing text). But as I have argued before, typing the email response, creating the Draft Review Matrix, writing the list of items I had to edit, all of this was grunt work, and therefore, it should also count as writing.

What counts as grunt work?

I wish the grunt work were valued as much as the actual production of words. But all academic activity includes a certain amount of this type of activity. I hope we can find a way to value it as much as we do other research-related activities.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 6, 2016

3 quick intermediate Twitter user tips for academics

I have always wanted to write an extensive “Twitter Guide for Academics”, but I actually don’t have the time, so I’m just going to quickly point out to three things that may make your Twitter experience better if you’re an academic.

1) Threading conversations.

Twitter is an ever-evolving platform. It’s really annoying that whenever one seems to master a feature that this social network provides, it screws up again. One good thing I’ve noticed, lately, is it’s ability to thread conversations. To thread a conversation (specifically, to make sure that your tweetstorm actually makes sense and follows a logical thread) you need to tweet, then respond to that tweet, erase your Twitter ID, then continue typing. Here’s a thread of mine:

If you click on the date that the tweet was posted, a Twitter window will open showing my original tweet with the continuing tweets in the thread.

2) Muting people

I am a heavy-volume tweeter. I know that for many people, I’m the person to go to with questions about whom to contact in different fields. I also find a lot of interesting stuff that I may not be working on, but that my followers might. Or I simply want to amplify the voices of marginalized academics. So, because I’m a heavy-volume tweeter, I tell people they can mute me. Yes, if you click the little nut icon besides the “Follow” button (or if you’re following the person, the button indicating “Following” all filled with blue), you will find a host of things you can do to that profile’s Twitter ID. One of them, most effective, is muting them. You can’t tell what they’re saying because they’re muted and you can’t see them.

3) Customize your experience, don’t let Twitter customize it for you.

Because Twitter aren’t stupid (and they love changing their interface until they find a way to make money off of you), they make it horrendously hard for you to find an easy way to edit your settings and personalize your experience. Luckily, if you just go to https://twitter.com/settings/account, you can easily access them and personalize your account. First, you can decide if you want to read all your tweets, or just the Top Tweets that Twitter’s algorithm decides they want to show you.

Twitter automatically sets these, and it will ask you for your password to make any changes and validate them. Hmmhmm, that’s right. You’re basically hostage to whatever THEY want to set your account. Except, you CAN make changes. Here’s another change I made. Under the Notifications tab, I removed the possibility that Twitter sends me emails for everything, except new follows and DMs.

By turning off (under Notifications) the “Quality Filter”, you allow yourself to actually see who interacts with your tweets instead of letting Twitter’s algorithm decide for you.

I wish I had tricks to hide promoted tweets and those “in case you missed these” and “So-and-So liked this tweet so we thought you might like them too” but I don’t know them. If anybody does, I’m all ears!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 5, 2016

On the value of urban ethnography in understanding contemporary society

I recently came across an article in The Guardian on McDonald’s (yes, the transnational corporate chain that has been at times criticized for the negative impact that fast food may have on human nutrition) and was astonished to find described a phenomenon I’ve seen throughout the many years I’ve undertaken urban ethnographic work: marginalized populations building community inside a McDonald’s branch.

Surprising as this may sound to people who don’t do urban ethnography (or haven’t experienced this phenomenon either by observing it or living it), many low-income people can only afford to eat a McDonald’s combo meal. As low in nutritious content as its food may be, McDonald’s offers something more than just the food: a space to gather and interact with other people who may be in the same position as yours.

I’ve observed this phenomenon in dozens of cities. I have, myself, eaten at McDonald’s (because it’s the cheapest food you can get in many places, and because it gives me a sense of the neighbourhood). I’ve been inside McD’s branches in Dublin (Ireland), Aarhus (Copenhagen), Chicago, Washington DC, Milwaukee, San Francisco (USA), Madrid (Spain), Mexico City, Aguascalientes, Leon (Mexico), Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Victoria (Canada), just to name a few. The phenomenon is pretty much the same. I don’t study food anthropology nor the urban geography of foodways, but somehow this topic seems fascinating, because as I commented on Twitter, my experience mirrors the comments by The Guardian’s journalist. I quote:

When many lower-income Americans are feeling isolated by the deadening uniformity of things, by the emptiness of many jobs, by the media, they still yearn for physical social networks. They are not doing this by going to government-run community service centers. They are not always doing this by utilizing the endless array of well-intentioned not-for-profit outreach programs. They are doing this on their own, organically across the country, in McDonald’s.

There are many scholarly ways to examine this community-building phenomenon. One could invoke the social capital thesis of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, or theories of racial segregation as driving factors in the growth of fast food chain branches in marginalized neighbourhood. But regardless of the theoretical framework invoked, I strongly believe ethnography is the right method to answer questions prompted by this phenomenon. I’m not alone in thinking this, as this 1979 ethnography of a Burger King franchise shows.

As Dr. Malini Ranganathan indicates, it is fundamentally important that we recognise that sometimes in our studies we have assumptions about the linkages between different elements of the social system (in this case, as Dr. Ranganathan shows, space, food and culture).

And on that note, I would like to point people out to the latest issue of Food and Foodways, where you’ll find discussions of eating in semi-public spaces. From what I could read in the introductory essay, this collection is written by ethnographers, and I believe that this methodological slant will definitely enrich the conversation.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – November 3, 2016

Using #AcWriMo to develop a daily writing practice

My relationship with #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month, which happens at the same time as National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, in November) has always been a bit of love and hate.

#AcWri

In 2012, I joined thousands of fellow academics in #AcWriMo, and as expected, it was a bit too overwhelming for me, BUT I did achieve a lot. In hindsight, I think I was trying to write A LOT every single day (at a time when it was not something I did in a structured way), and despite the fact that I wasn’t teaching at the time, I had just left Canada and settled in Mexico and it wasn’t the best idea. But I did produce lots, and lots of text.

In 2013, I didn’t join #AcWriMo, for several reasons. I was teaching (only one class, but it was a new course, and it was really overwhelming), and I travelled to Europe three times during a teaching semester (not the best idea). Plus I am not a big believer in writing in long sprees.

In 2014, I encouraged OTHER academics to join #AcWriMo although I didn’t do it myself. By then, I was already teaching 2 courses in the fall, which basically makes writing for extended periods of time basically impossible for me. 2014 was also the year I almost died twice, from overwork. And my daily writing practice (2 hours a day) was already very well established. So I decided to encourage other people to do it if it works for them.

In 2015, I was so busy that I didn’t even *think* of #AcWriMo. Again, teaching 2 courses and stressed about the results of my three-year reappointment (which I passed, with flying colours if I may be so bold to add).

And in 2016, I am going to encourage people to join #AcWriMo at their own pace so that they can develop a writing practice.

Cleaning up Mendeley citations

The model of #AcWriMo (at least, the original version that I read) is simple (I’m quoting from the PhD2Published page):

  1. Decide on your goal.
  2. Declare it!
  3. Draft a strategy.
  4. Discuss your progress.
  5. Don’t slack off.
  6. Declare your results.

As I’ve suggested before (and I’m not the only one, Dr. Aimee Morrison and Dr. Jo Van Every have also argued similarly), you can do a lot with 15-30 minutes a day. If you need some advice on academic writing, you might want to read some of my own blog posts on the topic.

Literature Road Mapping

To discuss your progress and declare it, you may want to join the #GetYourManuscriptOut crowd.

There are lots of things you can do during #AcWriMo (November):

This year, I won’t be doing #AcWriMo because we are nearing the end of the semester, and I am overwhelmed with a few deadlines. BUT, I will be monitoring the #AcWriMo hashtag and the #GetYourManuscriptOut hashtag to provide encouragement on a regular basis!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – October 29, 2016