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Organizing child-friendly academic conferences and workshops

I’m not a parent, but both my brothers who are PhD holders have children (in fact, one of them went through the PhD already having two small girls, aged 7 and 3), and my Mom is also an academic, so I’m quite sensitive to the challenges that academic parents face. I just participated in the annual meeting of the Mexican Association for Labor Studies (don’t ask, a very good friend of mine asked me to help him moderate a few panels, and I never say no to good friends) and noticed a sizeable number of female academics bringing their kids to the conference. I made a comment on Twitter as to how important it was to enable parents who are academics to bring their children to the conference.

But some of the responses to my tweet really impressed me, particularly some professors who had the smarts to PLAN beforehand and make sure to make the workshop/conference children-friendly.

This is important, because the opposite (e.g. having someone escort you out because your child became slightly unruly) also happens (see tweet below by my friend Rachel Tiller).

While it’s hard for me to really understand all the challenges associated with balancing parenthood and academic life, I am well aware of them and I strongly advocate for those whose voices we often don’t hear enough.

I advocate for a kinder academia, and part of this advocacy includes, in my view, a children-friendly atmosphere at conferences. Luckily, it appears as though major learned societies like the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and the International Studies Association (ISA) are also responding too.

And my good friend Amanda Bittner has now put forth the challenge to the organizers of Congress 2016 in Calgary (I will be going, as it’s Canadian Political Science Association, CPSA, and it’s where my brother lives so I have plenty of reasons to come visit, including my two little nephews!). In fact, I may bring my nephews one of the days to CPSA.

EDIT – Amanda makes an important point: the challenge that not having “on-site” child-minding presents for academics who are nervous about leaving their children with someone else.

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Online resources to help students summarize journal articles and write critical reviews

The courses I teach tend to be very practical and applied. My teaching philosophy is founded on helping my students acquire employable skills. Writing solid, robust, concise and easy-to-read analytical summaries should be an acquired tool that they then can transfer to other fields. Politicians, bureaucrats and high-level people in government that I’ve talked to have always considered summarizing information a great tool that undergraduate and graduate education should provide. Yet, the online resources I found to help students summarize journal articles and write critical reviews left me wanting.

AcWri handwritten notes and journal article reading

There are, of course, plenty of resources. But reading a vast majority of them always left me with a feeling that either they were too long for students to get through (in addition to the relatively high reading load I am assigning for each of my courses), or too focused on the mechanics and too little on the routine-building strategy. So I took to Twitter and Facebook to ask whether someone had found an online resource that would help my students learn how to summarize journal articles. Here are a few suggestions:

a) Dr. Karen Beckwith (Case Western Reserve University) shared with me her handouts on critical reading. Professor Beckwith is incredibly generous and I’m sure she would share them with you if you requested them. They are very useful because they are tailored to each specific course she teaches. She also has a guideline on how to learn from movies.

b) John McMahon (CUNY) shared with me some of his handouts, which are posted online, including this one on critical reading and note-taking. John and I have a different view on highlighting journal articles, and I will write a blog post on this soon.

c) Tressie McMillan Cottom (Virginia Commonwealth University) shared with me her notes from a grad seminar with Regina Werum at Emory University. Professor McMillan Cottom’s notes are a summary of how to read a sociology article.

d) Dr. Neenah Luna-Estrella (NEU) suggested the following books to help students learn how to read and summarize scholarly (and not so scholarly) works. Not online resources, but still, very good ones.

Pyrczak, F. (2014). Evaluating research in academic journals (6th ed.). Glendale, CA: Pyrczak Publishing.

Harris, R. A. (2011). Using Sources Effectively (3rd ed.). Glendale, CA: Pyrzak Publishing.

e) Online resources that I found valuable:
– University of the Fraser Valley Writing Centre’s guide to summarizing an article – this is particularly good because UFV is primarily undergraduate teaching.
Donna Vandergrift ‘s handout actually gives a guideline for students on which content should be written in each paragraph. This kind of detailed guidance is fundamental.
– This guide on how to read a journal article is a bit long, but it does have some additional references that you can look at.

f) Karra Kshimabukuro shared the guide to writing a Rhetorical Precis, which is a tool that others had suggested we should look at, and apparently, (what I call “analytical summaries” may be rhetorical precis too 🙂 (thanks Theresa MacPhail for reminding me of this!)

I’m happy to continue compiling resources if you want to drop a comment on this post or send me an email (sometimes my commenting system isn’t the best).

Posted in academia, teaching, writing.

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My Fall 2015 weekly schedule

If you’ve followed me on Twitter or read my blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m pretty rigid in my schedule. Ever since I was a child I have done everything adhering to strict deadlines and I started using calendars perhaps in my very early years. A lot of people think I have a very regimented schedule (this is the previous post where I shared mine), but this term, I built a lot more flexibility, particularly because I do want to do some fieldwork still. As you can see, I can’t write for 2 hours every day (because I need to exercise, have breakfast and shower and drive to campus), but I still can definitely squeeze 10 hours per week of writing. I NEED to protect my research and writing time even during teaching semesters (I only teach one semester per year).

Calendar with 10 hours of #AcWri

You will notice two things: First, that I still have 10 hours worth of writing time, but I have distributed them unevenly. I still wake up at 4:30am, and I still exercise, and spend time out with my friends. But all the white gaps you see? Those are for the things that I need to do at some point, including fieldwork. So if I need to go on the field on Friday, I’ll prepare my lecture on the Tuesday. And second, that I have not scheduled EVERY SINGLE MINUTE of my day. I have left ample time for contingencies. I still protect my time, particularly writing and class preparation, and self-care, but the rest of the time? I leave room for contingencies and potential fieldwork.

I teach 2 courses this fall, plus a lot of continuing education diploma sessions, so it will be intense, but I also believe it will be rewarding. If I need to change something, it probably will be writing in the very early morning because I still want to make it to the gym before I go to campus. I also put class preparation on the Friday so that I can clear my docket before the weekend. But if I need to do fieldwork, I’ll move it earlier in the week.

Posted in environmental policy.

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On the need of slow scholarship: Towards a new paradigm of research

The “slow everything” movements (slow water, slow food, slow blogging) have become popular in recent years, largely as a response to the excessive speed at which we lead our lives nowadays. Given that one of my claims to fame has always been how fast I am at doing everything I do, my own response to the slow movement seems to have been, aptly and pun intended, being slow on the uptake. The slow science movement has been gaining momentum particularly because of the way in which we have been pushed by exogenous forces to publish more, write more, give more talks, bring more grant money into our institutions.

Given my own health issues in the past year, and being confronted with the fragility of my human being, I started to push back against this paradigm myself. Ironically, in the year where I lost an entire month of my life to illness (January 2015) is also the year where I’ve travelled to the most places (New Orleans in the US for #ISA2015, Chicago for #AAG2015, Vancouver in Canada for #CAG2015, Edmonton in Canada for #IASC2015 and Milan in Italy for #ICPP2015, plus two keynotes in Montreal and a few workshops and other research trips here and there).

My good friend Alison Mountz (who was a graduate school friend of mine, and with whom I regained touch when we saw each other this year at the Association of American Geographers conference in Chicago) and her coauthors have written an extraordinary piece on the need for slow scholarship as a mode of feminist resistance to the neoliberal university. I encourage you to read it as it is an excellent piece on how shifting the way we approach research can, through collective action, engage and possibly affect change on the way research and science (and social science) is done nowadays.

Hotel AcWri

I was reflecting on the slow scholarship movement in the past couple of days because I wrote a book chapter in two days, but I had been already slowly thinking about this paper and the logic of its argument for TWO YEARS. Yes, the very first draft of this paper had already been written (and I forgot about it) in the summer of 2013. So, you can’t really rush science. And while I encourage my fellow scholars to get their manuscripts out when they’ve been sitting on the desk for too long, it’s more a call to complete the cycle of slow scholarship. Once you know the ideas are there, the research is there, it’s time to finish it off.

A nice reflection post-AAG2015 on the slow scholarship paper by Mountz et al can be read here.

Posted in academia, writing.

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#MyAcWriStrategies: Write first, edit later, and edit by hand

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the way in which I conduct research and I write is that I find that the old-fashioned way works best. For me, doing everything online (on the screen) doesn’t work. I am quite well-versed in computer-aided qualitative analysis (I use N*Vivo, Atlas Ti and will start using Dedoose once I figure it out), yet I still code my data by hand (with colored pens, markers and highlighters). I work the same way when I write. I edit by hand. And I write first, and edit later.

Old-fashioned editing

To be very honest, my approach to academic writing (and particularly mine) is to always draft first and edit later. Whatever I write, for the two hours I do (or the 4 periods of 30 minutes a day) I write as it comes out, and then edit. For the book chapter I just finished, I actually wrote a very first draft (a skeleton) that then I started filling out by hand, with Post-It adhesive notes, colored pens, etc. (as you can see in the photo below). I do edit the really, really old fashioned way.

Old-fashioned editing

If I don’t have a first draft, it’s much harder for me to start filling up the blanks. And as I have mentioned before, I think in terms of filling up paragraphs rather than worrying about finishing a full chapter, manuscript, conference paper. I don’t think I’m alone in suggesting that you should write first and edit later (here is Rachael Cayley on drafting and editing). You can do the editing through the full document, or as Patrick Dunleavy suggests, doing reverse outlining and paragraph re-planning. Pat Thomson is quite right in saying that we shouldn’t obsess about producing perfect first drafts.

I have no shame in admitting that I do things the old-fashioned way. Of course I know how to use computer-aided-just-about-everything, but the feeling of shaping how a paper is looking through handwritten notes and Post-Its is just amazing. Of course it helps that I have a stationery addiction, because I use every single tool I can to achieve my research and teaching goals.

stationery

Posted in academia, writing.

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Cleaning and organizing my office before the school term starts

While normally I try to keep my desk quite neat, both at my home office and at my campus office, I always need to spend some time cleaning up, organizing and rearranging my stuff before the new semester starts. I do this as well every time I finish a writing piece. I need to reorganize everything and always start with a clean slate. This is my office after the clean up.

Clean office at CIDE

Clean office at CIDE

Clean office at CIDE

Unfortunately, as you can see, the number of books I have has now officially outgrown the space I have available on my bookshelves. So now I need to ask my carpenter to build me another bookcase. Yikes. Before the semester starts officially (we come back to work on Monday, but I start teaching August 17th).

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Why teach spatial analysis and economic geography in a public policy school?

Since I’m on a blogging binge, I might as well bring out a topic that has been on my mind for quite a while. A lot of people have asked me why did I choose to accept teaching Regional Development, a course most associated with either urban planners, or human geographers, or even regional economists. I accepted it and have shaped it in the way I now teach it (see the syllabus for Fall 2015 here) because I strongly believe undergraduates in public policy (the degree we teach at CIDE Region Centro) need to learn spatial analysis, urban and regional development and economic geography. The reason why I use spatial analysis is because in my doctorate I did both political science and human geography, and as a result, I think both as a political scientist and as a human geographer. But it’s strange how many people won’t see the value of economic geography as a discipline and its applications in human geography.

Syllabi renewal

It doesn’t help that most people confuse economic geography with geographical economics, and that the quantitative turn in applied spatial analysis has led a lot of people to refuse engaging with the literature (Krugman, I’m not happy with you). Since I do multiple methods, including spatial analysis using GIS and to some degree, spatial econometrics, I don’t mind the quantitative turn. But ironically (and this surprised an economist colleague of mine), economic geography (particularly the analysis of economic activity and its spatial location) was primarily based on the work of the economist Alfred Marshall who discovered industrial districts in the leather and footwear industries in the United States of America, circa 1931. By the way, did I tell you my doctoral dissertation was a study of the leather and footwear industries in Mexico? Now you start to see why I’m still so much in love with the industrial districts literature.

Syllabi renewal

Ironically, Marshall’s work as an economist strengthened the economic geography and geographical economics fields, even if he wasn’t a proper geographer. There are a large number of excellent contemporary economic and urban geographers (Trevor Barnes, Jaime Peck, Oli Mould, Ayona Datta, Gavin Brown, Roger Keil, Anne Mosher, Ann Markusen, Anna Lee Saxenian, Maryann Feldman, just to mention but a few) whose work has direct public policy implications. So I figured that, if I were to give my undergraduate students an advantage and an edge with regards to other graduates from public policy programs, it would be through applied spatial analysis and economic geography applications to policy analysis.

The only other courses I found that has some similarity with what I teach is this course on Public Policy for Metropolitan Regions and this one on the politics of urban processes. I am sure that many other scholars have thought similarly to me on this topic, but I feel that my syllabus is innovative and will provide my students with a broad skill set that they can apply to the study of any public policy.

It’s also relevant to my decision to teach spatial analysis and economic geography that CIDE (the Region Centro campus) has a subnational, regional analysis slant to research and an explicit mandate to conduct applied policy research that is relevant to regions, metropolitan systems and cities. So it also feels quite obvious that our graduates should have a strong component of spatial analysis in their public policy coursework. This semester will be an exciting one!

Posted in academia, cluster theory, geography.

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On the power of ethnography in public policy research

I was going to write this blog post a long time ago, every since Ryan Briggs (Virginia Tech) alerted me to these posts by Tom Pepinsky (Cornell University), Ken Opalo (Stanford University) and Chris Blattman (Columbia University), but then the “worm wars” debate happened on Twitter, I got pulled into it (inadvertently and unwillingly) and well, here I am writing about a topic I wanted to write well after I wanted to write about it, but much later than I wanted to. Anyhow…

Ryan discusses Chris‘, Tom‘s and Ken’s posts which more or less call for more ethnographic research and institutional analysis to help improve aid effectiveness on the ground (I hope I didn’t misread and misinterpret anyone, all their posts are linked so do read them). I actually think it was Tom who suggested that there is a bigger role for ethnography and more institutional analysis, to help understand which interventions work best, as Chris asked for, instead of blindly implementing skills-training programs.

Informal waste picker in Aguascalientes

Ken furthers Tom’s point and emphasizes the importance of understanding local elites in how these programs are implemented. Local elites may be factors to push forward or bring into a stalemate any intervention you want to do on the ground. And Ryan calls for iterative, repetition-style trials where simple interventions are tried out, tested and analyzed.

All four posts really struck me as highlighting the need for more cross-disciplinary, multi-method research. I don’t work in international development or foreign aid, but I am a specialist in comparative public policy, and it seems to me as though the interventions that Chris, Tom, Ken and Ryan discuss are in fact policy interventions, and as such, we need to examine them closely. I am a big fan, believer, proponent and practitioner of ethnographic work. I study wastewater governance, sanitation and solid waste management. I visit and spend extended periods of time in landfills, follow scavengers through their rummaging activities, and blend into communities where access to toilets, sewerage, drainage and clean drinking water are in short supply. For me, ethnographic work is fundamental to what I do, and one of the most powerful tools in my research methods arsenal.

Sewage problems in New Orleans (Warehouse District)

So, what I seem hear from Chris, Ryan, Tom and Ken is a call for more institutional ethnography. While the more traditional version of institutional ethnography was developed by Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith, and you’ll find it defined as the study of textually-mediated relations, the work I do, and I follow more closely is that of Elinor Ostrom, who studied how institutions emerge through the ethnographic observation, on the ground, of routines and actions of actors. Traditional institutional ethnography focuses a lot on texts, whereas the model that Ostrom implemented places more emphasis on observation of routines, rules, actions and norm emergence. For example, in my own work doing institutional analysis of water governance organizations, I have studied how rules and norms emerge in river basin councils, by actually participating in these roundtables, following closely how each actor interacts with each other, studying their routines, rules (both written and unwritten) and their practices. This is institutional analysis merged with ethnography (and quite obviously, I simplify for purposes of this blog).

Sanitation and wastewater in Mexico City

If I were to translate this to the development field, I think we (all five of us) agree that we need on-the-ground, in-depth analyses of simple interventions, repeated through time, focusing on all the actors (especially elites with unbridled power). This is definitely something ethnographic work, and especially institutional ethnography are particularly well-suited to do. And one of the challenges I will have in future years with my undergraduate students in Public Policy is to teach them how to do robust institutional analysis and how to implement ethnography in policy settings. It will be fun!

Posted in academia, writing.

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Binge-writing vs writing two hours every day

Last night I submitted a book chapter I had committed to finishing before August 14th. Actually, I had promised I would have sent it sometime in July. Nevertheless, I didn’t think about the fact that this had been an incredibly exhausting semester and that I would actually need to take the three weeks holiday that CIDE has during the summer. So on Thursday at 1:30pm I started writing, from scratch. I finished the paper at 7pm on Friday. 8,000 words, 10,000 with bibliography. Decently coherent, and will probably need a few revisions from the editors and the external reviewers (it’s a peer-reviewed book chapter). I, the proponent of “write two hours every day“, did binge-write for once. Tsk, tsk.

AcWri at the home officeSo, why did I binge-write when I am so against it and when I’m one of the proponents of “writing two hours every day”? Well, firstly, because I was on deadline. Nothing motivates me so much to finish something as a deadline. The editors of this particular book have been incredibly good to me. They’ve been kind, they’ve been collegial and they’ve also promoted my work everywhere. I felt that it was my duty to have the book chapter done before they had to submit the manuscript to the university press.

Secondly, because I already had pre-written the paper in my head. I found an old draft (2013) of a similar paper I was planning to write. It used the same three theoretical frameworks. It followed logically the same way as this book chapter. Clearly, in my head, I already knew what I was planning to say and what I wanted to write. It was really just a matter of getting words into the paper. Thirdly, because I was well rested, focused and prepared to write. For the first time in months, I took time for myself, really for myself. I went out alone and went to the movies. Every day of this week. I had dinner by myself, and I basically socialized with no one. This helped me clear my brain and feel as though I had disconnected completely from academic life.

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

So when is it ok to binge-write? I think I need to reformulate this as: “everyone has their own method“. Mine is based on discipline-writing. I have been raised using pretty strict calendars and schedules to organize my life, and this has translated into how I do my research, teach and write I use every bit of time I have to complete at least 10 hours of writing a week, even if not all the writing is generative. For example, much of the writing time I’ve had in the past couple of months has been me summarizing literature, typing my field notes and writing memos. It’s not “research manuscript” or “journal article” or “book chapter” writing, but it’s stuff that will end up helping me move forward with my research.

My academic writing #AcWri processWhen I first started writing about my scholarly process, I experienced backlash from other binge-writers, and from folks whose schedules don’t allow for the kind of focused writing I can do. I always have acknowledged my privilege. I’m single, don’t have kids, and I have a very low teaching load (2 courses per semester), plus I have 1.5 research assistants (e.g. I share 50% of the time of one of my RAs and I have one full one). But my mantra is always “even 15 minutes help”.

Whatever little time you can use to write, just use it. And that’s exactly what I did with this book chapter. All of a sudden, it was the end of my holiday weeks (Thursday) and I had already cleaned up my office, organized everything, filed everything and was ready to write with a clean slate. So I just went for it. And I didn’t binge-write for 24 hours non-stop. I wrote from 1:30pm to 4:30pm, had lunch, came back at 5:30pm, wrote until 8pm, then started writing again at 11:30am, went for lunch at 4pm, came back to writing at 5pm and finished off the manuscript by 7pm. And I went to the movies on Thursday night.

I am not a “proponent” of binge-writing, but sometimes you just got to do what you got to do.

Posted in academia, writing.

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My Regional Development Fall 2015 syllabus (CIDE)

Syllabi renewalAs you may know, I undertook a similar exercise to the one I did to include more female scholars into my State and Local Government syllabus, but since there is no central “Human Geographers” or “Urban and Regional Planning” Facebook page, I only asked on Twitter for suggestions. I also went back to my graduate school days (I don’t usually come back to economic geography unless it’s absolutely necessary) and re-read my comprehensive examinations’ papers. After the exercise, I promised I’d post it, so you can download my Regional Development Fall 2015 syllabus here. Hopefully it’s useful! If you were to summarize my syllabus, it’s basically “spatial analysis and economic geography applications to public policy, plus regional economic and urban development with a dash of urban politics and multilevel governance”.

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