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My experience at #AAG2015 Some reflections

AAG Fetishes of Water GovernanceWhile I do a lot of spatial analysis, I follow a lot of human geographers on Twitter and I did a lot of economic geography in my doctoral dissertation, I hadn’t been to the Association of American Geographers (AAG). I had done a few Canadian Association of Geographers (CAG), and for the first time in my life, this year I’m doing both. Well, I did AAG already (last week) and will be at CAG in early June 2015. This year, I decided to organize a couple of paper sessions with Oriol Mirosa (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Jeremy Schmidt (Dalhousie University, soon-to-be-at Carleton University). I’ve always loved Oriol and Jeremy’s work and it was a great experience to collaborate in this project.

What can I say about my experience “at the AAG” (that’s how most geographers seemed to call it)? It was AMAZING. I have to note that I missed two of the biggest political science conferences (Midwest Political Science Association, MPSA and Western Political Science Association, WPSA) because they were way too close to AAG for me to spend 3-4 weeks conferencing. In many ways, I felt that I had made the wrong calculus because so many political scientists I wanted to meet were both at WPSA and MPSA.

AAG 2015 Association of American Geographers conference

HOWEVER…

My experience at AAG was nothing short of outstanding. You have to understand, I was spending one week of my holidays (we are on holidays right now at my campus) in Chicago for a conference I had never been to, and while I do spatial analysis, my obvious slant towards public policy and political science is quite visible, both on my work and online. So I didn’t know how the geographers would react to my work. Happy to report that they reacted really well. I am positively impressed by the kindness with which human geographers conduct themselves while providing feedback to other presenters. Other academic learned societies could do well to follow their example.

Jeremy, Oriol and myself organized two paper sessions around the topic of Fetishes of Water Governance. We wanted to critically interrogate the most relevant aspects of water governance issues that seem to be the object of affection (or shall we say, object of obsession?) of many social scientists. Why are we fixated on public participation? Why is the human right to water such an important construct, and is it feasible to implement? Why are we obsessed with data, and when is it enough?

AAG Fetishes of Water Governance

AAG Fetishes of Water Governance

AAG Fetishes of Water Governance

AAG Fetishes of Water Governance

AAG Fetishes of Water Governance

AAG Fetishes of Water Governance

Our sessions, Fetishes of Water Governance I and Fetishes of Water Governance II achieved exactly that, and even though we were allocated in what I call “The Dumps” (the most intricate, hardest-to-find furthest room they could possibly find, and the last two sessions of the last day of the conference), we had an extraordinary audience that was willing to stay with us for the entire set of papers, which I found rewarding and helpful.

AAG Fetishes of Water Governance

The discussant was Kathryn Furlong (Université de Montréal), a well-known scholar in urban water governance (and a very good friend of mine who was also a colleague in graduate school).

AAG Fetishes of Water Governance

I felt really happy to have Kathryn discuss our papers because she really brought out some excellent comments on the reification of specific fetishes. I look forward to what will come out of our sessions, most likely a special issue of a journal.

One thing I wanted to note was that every single host hotel (with the Hyatt Regency Chicago being the main coordinator and host, apparently) served water from the tap, and that there were abundant water bottle refilling stations throughout all the hotels. This is not a small feat to achieve and I wanted to note it, given my own research on bottled water and the marketization and commodification of water.

AAG 2015

Quite obviously, I attended a lot of the water sessions. There were a number of urban geography and geographies of sexuality and economic geography sessions, but I concentrated on water as this is the field where I am most established and where I wanted to see my colleagues. Kathryn Furlong presented work she’s doing with Michelle Kooy on Worlding Water Supply.

AAG 2015

Rebecca Lave (Indiana University, at Bloomington, and someone I’ve slowly become friends with because we’ve seen each other so much in the last couple of years) is a critical physical geographer who studies political ecology and physical geography, particularly in riparian streams, and she did a fantastic presentation on stream mitigation banks, which seems to provide a similar alternative to that of carbon credits and tradeable permits.

AAG 2015

I also saw some preliminary work that Margaret Wilder (University of Arizona) is doing on desalination in the US-Mexico border with a number of colleagues, including my friend Nicolas Pineda Pablos.

AAG2015

I also saw the work that Harriet Bulkeley, Mat Paterson, Matt Hoffmann, Sarah Burch, Patricia Romero Lankao and others are doing on pathways to decarbonisation and trigger/tipping points in climate governance in urban systems. Sarah Burch (University of Waterloo) is also a very good friend of mine and former colleague in graduate school, so it was nice to see some of her post-PhD work in action, on community-based adaptation. I’ve always loved Sarah’s work and it’s nice to maintain the friendship AND the interest in each other’s scholarly work.

AAG2015 Association of American Geographers conference

AAG2015 Association of American Geographers conference

I also saw work on water and irrigation in Guanajuato, presented by Heather-Lee Brown (PhD student of Wendy Jepson of Texas A&M University, whose research I’ve followed for a long time) and a paper presented by Wendy herself on time and space in water social and geographical research, and attended several sessions where these topics were discussed (technology, time, space, flow). While some stuff did fly over my head because I’m not a social studies of science or science, technology and society studies scholar, overall, I think the water sessions at AAG were fantastic.

My overall Twitter stream of the conference is available here. My photo set on Flickr is here. And I’ll definitely be back to AAG, that’s for sure. I got to meet many people, see old friends and make new. And my research will definitely move forward thanks to the AAG. I’m really excited for what the next conferences will bring, including CAG.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 28, 2015

My #AcWri strategies: Integrate reading into your writing workflow

My good friend (and graduate school colleague) Amanda Bittner (who is a professor of political science at Memorial University of Newfoundland) was asking on Facebook how do other fellow academics keep up with journal article reading (and reading, in general) other than binge-reading for when we are preparing a syllabus or writing a paper. I am not going to claim by any stretch of the imagination that my process is efficient, nor that I’m good at keeping up with journals and/or reading articles or book chapters or even books. But I promised Amanda I would blog about what I do and how do I do it, so the second in my series of My AcWri Strategies posts (the first being my suggestion that you should be working at the paragraph level instead of frustrating yourself with filling up pages) is how I integrate reading into my writing workflow (and perhaps you could take up some of the recommendations I have here for your own process).

AcWri

Here is a brief summary of what I do to keep up with journals and maintain a steady stream of articles in my reading pile. I track both gray literature and academic literature, so I will interweave both into my comments on this post.

1. I have set up Google Alerts for specific research topics (sanitation, privatization, remunicipalization, Mexico, water policy). This helps me keep my finger on where the global conversation is. A little bit of a problem is that I track both terms in English and in Spanish, so this becomes a little bit too much information to filter. But I usually go through my alerts when I’m writing specific papers, or updating my memorandums (I’ll explain what a memorandum is below).

2. I have set up email alerts for the tables of contents of journals. Many (a bit too many, in my view) journals. This helps me see what’s being published. I only have journal table of content alerts in English, as I really don’t track the Spanish language ones. You could say I’m excluding myself from a lot of the conversation that is happening around water policy in Mexico in Spanish. However, I’m subscribed to the Network of Social Scientists of Water in Mexico (RISSA, in Spanish), and most people promote their own journal articles so I feel I’m connected to the Spanish language literature.

3. I print out interesting papers that I may want to read later. Call me old fashioned, but I am used to reading in print, highlighting with actual highlighter pen, writing notes by hand both on the margins of the article and then typing those notes in a memorandum. I sort these journal articles, book chapters, reports, etc. per topic, and I add a little sticker with the article/book chapter’s authors’ last names and year of publication for easy access. Then, whenever I am travelling, I choose a few of those to bring with me. This is often problematic when I feel like I have too much to read, where I switch to an electronic version instead and bring my tablet.

Working and filing journal articles

4. I write memoranda to summarize and imprint what I learned from an article into my memory. I learned to write memoranda from Brian O’Neill, a professor of social work who teaches qualitative methods. He taught me to always write “memos to myself” (e.g. self-reflective notes). Drawing on insights from his class, I decided to write summaries of journal articles, book chapters, etc. Each memorandum has a title (that is usually descriptive enough and that I replicate in the MS Word file) and then I summarize the journal article. I draw quotes from each article/book chapter and type them out. This method of using memoranda helps me because whenever I want, I can cite/quote an author, and I already have the text typed (copy-and-paste in this case is your best friend).

My academic writing #AcWri process

5. I read when I travel. Because I travel so much (for conferences, workshops, fieldwork and to visit my parents), I use those travelling times to read. But along the same lines, I always make notes (handwritten if there is no space to use my laptop computer) and highlight relevant text.

AcWri handwritten notes and journal article reading

6. I read every morning to kick-start my writing. This is a strategy that I didn’t invent. My former professor, Terre Satterfield, suggested to me that she always read an article or book chapter to get her thinking going. I figured that if I was going to read, I should always write summaries of those articles/book chapters/reports. I also link specific reading I do with the paper/manuscript I’m working on.

7. Sometimes, I binge-read. I am not above binge-writing or binge-reading (this is usually the case when I have a deadline and even my rigorous, 2-hours-a-day writing regime is not helping). What I do is a Google Scholar search, and also track the references that both cite articles I deem relevant, and those that are cited by specific authors. Sometimes, you got to do what you got to do. And I’m not about to scold anyone for binge-reading.

So these are my suggestions on how to integrate reading into my writing workflow. Again, full disclosure: I speed-read, and I have a pretty decent quasi-eidetic memory. Also, I have a very low teaching load (2-0), So I do read a lot because I can. But I really hope that sharing my strategies will possibly help others even if they’re more time-constrained, at least a bit.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 27, 2015

Upcoming talk: AAG 2015 – Citizen Participation in Water Governance as a Fetish? Explaining Mexico’s Integrated Water Resource Management Implementation Failure

I’m in Chicago right now for the 2015 meeting of the Association of American Geographers (can they please change it to American Association of Geographers already?!), and I’m loving it. While I’m a dual major in political science and human geography, most of the conferences I attend are usually public policy, political science or area studies (e.g. common pool resources, water, etc.). So I’m very glad I attended. It’s a new challenge to speak human geography while maintaining my political science background. I am also keen to see how a geography audience responds to my work, given that I usually bring up the spatial and locational dimension to political science and public policy groups. In this case, I’ve been bringing up the politics of spatial analysis to the geographical audience. This is an interesting and important challenge for me. I don’t want to just “rest in my laurels”. I want to be continuously challenged.

This conference is providing me with this opportunity and with the chance to meet up with geographers I’ve corresponded with on Twitter. AAG has been great even though I’m technically on holidays, and even though the panel sessions (Fetishes of Water Governance I and Fetishes of Water Governance II) I organized with Jeremy Schmidt and Oriol Mirosa are all the way on the Saturday afternoon.

river flow

My paper title and abstract follow.

Citizen Participation in Water Governance as a Fetish? Explaining Mexico’s Integrated Water Resource Management Implementation Failure
Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD
Assistant Professor, Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE)

Scholarship both in the social and natural sciences on integrated water resource management (IWRM) has settled more-or-less on managing through river basins/watersheds and using the river basin council as a model for effective/efficient water governance. While this paradigm has become quite popular in the literature, and several case studies of IWRM implementation in Mexico have been documented, no cohesive analytical effort has been undertaken (to the best of our understanding) to explore and analyze the characteristics under which the river basin council model does not operate well, and when it does. This paper sheds light on our understanding of the river basin model and interrogates whether governance by river basin councils and citizen participation are fetishes of water governance instead of effective institutional reforms. The paper aims to offer a balanced view, showcasing case studies of successful implementation of the river basin model, as well as cases where the model has failed. In particular, the paper explores the case of Mexican water policy as one where implementing IWRM has been less than successful.

Keywords: water governance, fetishes, integrated water resource management, governance by river basin councils, geographies of water

I’m here until Sunday if anybody wants to discuss my work on water governance or my work on informal waste recycling.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 23, 2015

My #AcWri strategies: Fill up paragraphs, one idea per paragraph

Sometimes I get random emails asking me “but, how do you do what you do?“. Most of these emails refer to my academic writing strategies. I’ve written about what I do to get my writing unstuck, what I do if I feel like I need to kickstart a writing session, and how I am disciplined about writing two hours every day and even how to procrastinate productively as an academic.

Although I should be very clear that my writing 2 hours every day often times means 4 blocks of 30 minutes, because it’s hard to find time to write for 2 hours every day. Even with how challenging it is to find time to write (and yes, I have two research assistants and a 0-2 teaching load, so I know my privilege), I do believe in the “even 15 minutes help” rule (see Jo Van Every’s challenge).

My CIDE office

I’ve decided to start a series (also, to force me to find time to blog!) on how I write. My process is complex, as I often read up a lot, and then continue reading as I go. I also collect data and continue the process as I write up the paper. So, my process isn’t perfect (none of them are!).

The first strategy I thought I’d share is that I don’t focus as much on pages written, but in seeing paragraphs filled. More specifically, I write out an outline of what I want to say, and I map out broadly the main message of each particular section of the paper. I write a few “beginning sentences” that help me create a thread that allows me to craft the full paper. For example, if I am writing about “governance”, I usually start by defining what governance is, then what the main characteristics of governance are, then the main criticisms of using governance, and then my own specific definition. This creates four sub-sections of the paper.

My academic writing #AcWri process

Then I write (in the example I am using here) a few sentences that will in turn become paragraphs. I write a brief sentence related to what governance means to Author X, then what it means for Author Y. Then I know that if I want, I can write an entire paragraph comparing both authors, and then I can bring a third author either in that paragraph, or as a contrasting sentence that opens the next paragraphs.

My #AcWri #GetYourManuscriptOut process

I find that if I focus on adding more sentences to a paragraph rather than worrying about how many pages I need to write per day, I feel much less stress about what I need to complete, and I feel much more accomplished. And you can easily write a paragraph in 15 minutes intervals, a sentence at a time. For some excellent writing advice on writing paragraphs, I’d recommend Patrick J. Dunleavy and his Write 4 Research website.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 12, 2015

Teaching public policy theories and analysis in continuing education courses

Following up from my previous post on what do you use to teach institutional analysis and public policy theories when faced with a different set of students (in this case, continuing education learners), I just wanted to add a couple of notes here. First, that I find this kind of teaching challenging as it often makes me wonder whether I am being clear on concepts that aren’t easy to grasp. One of the biggest challenges is to teach the concept of institutions, which are invisible and thus become a nebulous idea, and how organizations aren’t institutions. This conceptual confusion is frequent and has led to more than one student looking at me quizzically asking “uh… federalism as an institution?”

Diplomado Alta Direccion y Gerencia Publica 2014 CIDE Region Centro

This is an important issue and one that we don’t seem to be discussing enough. I Google’d “teaching public policy theories in continuing education” and I got ZERO results. You would think this would be discussed in a journal like the Journal of Political Science Education, or the Journal of Public Affairs Education.

Normally, I would teach Public Policy Theory using anything from Mike Howlett (like the Howlett and Ramesh classic), or Peter John’s book on public policy, or Paul Cairney’s. Right now I’m inclined to use (and I’ve already successfully used) Tanya Heikkila and Paul Cairney’s book chapter in the recent Weible and Sabatier (Theories of the Policy Process). But I wonder if there’s something much simpler for continuing education students.

I’d appreciate any and all suggestions!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 9, 2015

International Women’s Day 2015: Water, gender, sanitation and uncomfortable truths

March 8th is International Women’s Day. I’ve written before about how gender is a dimension that is often mentioned in water governance scholarship, but I don’t believe it has been given enough emphasis throughout the many decades of research on the social sciences of water. I’ve also written about the fact that we have not yet engaged in a holistic conversation on menstrual hygiene management (MHM) and the disproportionate negative impacts of lack of sanitation facilities can have on women, including violence. We can’t deny the link between functioning toilets and a lack of justice. And having no functioning toilets are a form of injustice towards women.

I am genuinely shocked that it’s 2015 and I still get snarky comments from a number of male scholars (and, surprisingly, even a number of female ones!) about how “not everything is about gender“. My own research can’t evade the gender dimension. I study cooperative behavior for resource cooperation, particularly water. I also study sanitation and access to toilets. If you think about the fact that “on average women and children travel 10-15 kilometers per day collecting water and carrying up to 20 kilos or 15 litres per trip“, you’ll realize why gender matters to me and why it is always a dimension of my research. Women bear the brunt of a region’s lack of sanitation facilities.

Somo Samo village well

Photo credit: World Bank Photo Collection on Flickr

I study informal waste recycling, as well. You’d probably be surprised about the large numbers of women who engage in scavenging. According to a WIEGO report, women also tend to make less money from refuse picking, sorting and selling than men. Thus gender matters to me and has an impact on my research, yet again.

wireburningvillagesorting_pic

Photo credit: Basel Action Network on Flickr

Moreover, I co-author with many female scholars (colleagues, and my own graduate and undergraduate students), and I have been mentored by excellent women. So, yes, to me, it IS all about gender. It will continue to be until we are able to achieve equality and erase structural barriers for the progress of women.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 7, 2015

Admitting failure in academia (and learning from it)

As I’ve written before, the more experience I gain in my academic work, the more I realize I’m still learning. Even though I’ve reshaped my research trajectory through time, every time I publish (or I have a rejected manuscript), I learn something about my research, about where my work is taking me, and so on.

Crossroads: Success or Failure

Credit: Stockmonkeys

The truth is that in the past few weeks, I’ve sometimes been assaulted by impostor syndrome. In particular because the first two things I did right after coming back from two months of absolute illness (that kept me mostly bed-ridden) were to give talks at prestigious universities (Carnegie Mellon University, twice and Concordia University, once), have research meetings (University of Pittsburgh, twice) AND participate in the International Studies Association 2015 Conference. I have felt inadequate more than once, despite having received nothing but stellar feedback.

This frustrates me because I realize that I am a big proponent of redefining success in academia. I should feel happy that I was able to successfully give talks in prestigious universities and conferences and receive positive feedback on where my research is taking me, and what I’m studying. I should be able to just simply enjoy successfully having presented a paper at an international conference despite having been bedridden less than a month before. And yet, here I was, in New Orleans, surrounded by many of the smartest people in the international relations/international studies/comparative politics fields, still wondering “Am I good enough to be here?”

The irony is that when I shared my feelings of inadequacy with many senior scholars whose work I respect and who have published way more than I have, was that their unanimous response was “yes, I have failed too – I have had manuscripts, grant proposals, conference abstracts rejected. We ALL feel inadequate at some point“. The larger lesson was “inevitably, since nobody is perfect, you will fail at some point, and what you do afterwards is what will mark your pathway“.

And THAT was perhaps the best lesson I could learn in early 2015, as I move forward this year. That as long as I continue to do research that pushes my intellectual and analytical boundaries, as long as I’m determined to continue working towards my goals, even in the face of defeat, I’ll be ok.

Dealing with rejection is hard, particularly in the face of a couple of very successful years (I published more journal articles and book chapters in the past 12 months than I have in a long period of time, and I have a lot of publications forthcoming). I recently got two proposals for the American Political Science Association (APSA) conference rejected, and their rejection stung. But then again, I learned that many of my good friends ALSO got rejected, and having organized conferences myself, I know program chairs have a really hard time choosing panels and allocating spaces in the face of a myriad fantastic proposals.

Success - P'tit Bazar 2007 (02)

Photo credit: Alter1fo on Flickr

I think that I need to keep reminding myself (for my benefit and that of my own students) that failure and rejection are part of academic life (and of life, in general). That as long as I continue to strive for balance and I continue to champion a more human, kinder, gentler academia, and as long as I continue working hard, publishing, mentoring students and doing my job to the best of my ability while making sure to NOT overwork myself, I will be ok (and so will they).

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 7, 2015

Teaching institutional analysis in continuing education public policy courses

This year, I’ve been teaching public policy analysis in continuing education (diploma) courses at CIDE. This is a nice (and refreshing) change from undergraduate and graduate teaching because it forces me to design simpler ways to teach people who already have their degrees and who need “just an upgrading/refresh crash course”. It is, however, a big challenge because it also forces me to find readings that will be simple and readable enough for the participants.

Call it personal bias, but I usually teach public policy theories and public policy analysis with work by Tanya Heikkila, Chris Weible, Paul Cairney, Michael Howlett, Kathryn Harrison, etc. This is quite normal, given that my PhD training in political science and public policy was in Canada, and thus I’m very familiar with the US, English and Canadian literatures. I’m slowly getting myself more acquainted with the Mexican literature, as well.

For my lecture on institutional analysis I relied on Cairney’s book chapter from his book “Understanding Public Policy: Theories and Issues“. I also relied on my colleague Mauricio Merino Huerta’s paper on the importance of routines, and on a table I created based on the Hall and Taylor 1996 classic on political science and the 3 varieties of neoinstitutionalisms.

Handout for 3 Institutionalisms

I found Paul Cairney’s summaries of theories in 1000 words extremely useful, and I strongly recommend it for teaching purposes.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 4, 2015

Upcoming talk: Ostrom Workshop Colloquium Series (Indiana University, Bloomington)

As many of my readers know, I have a very strong connection to the late Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom. My research has been strongly influenced by their scholarship, and their mentorship.

Ostrom research

The 5th Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop #WOW5OstromThus, it is a pleasure for me to come back to Bloomington to Indiana University’s Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (I presented last year at the 5th Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop, WOW5). I will be presenting my paper “River Basin Councils as Action Arenas: Analyzing Rules and Norms in the Lerma-Chapala River Basin Council Using the IAD Framework“ on March 23rd as part of the Colloquium Series. My talk will be broadcast live here. The abstract for my paper is shown below:

This paper uses Elinor Ostrom and collaborator’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and applies its insights to an underresearched area in the water field: sanitation policy. Water governance in Mexico has been paradigmatically driven by an internationally praised concept: integrated water resources management (IWRM). This paradigm suggests that water should be governed through multistakeholder roundtables called river basin councils. This paper uses empirical data from a cross-regional analysis of wastewater policies in five Mexican states whose territory is embedded within the Lerma-Chapala watershed to shed light on the complex network of cross-jurisdictional linkages and policy interactions around wastewater governance. To explain how policy decisions within river basins are made, I conducted an institutional ethnographic study of rules, norms and interactions within the river basin council, exploring the emergence of formal and informal governance rules. I use the Lerma-Chapala river basin council in Mexico as a case study to explain how norms, rules and interactions shape wastewater governance. The paper illuminates the complexities inherent to the politics of wastewater management in diverse urban habitats and provides fertile ground and a foundation for future research on the limitations of the river basin council model for water and wastewater governance.

Raul Pacheco-Vega outside Ostrom Workshop
If you’re in Bloomington, I’d love to see you there. Otherwise you can just check the livestream.

Posted in academia, policy analysis, public policy theories.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 4, 2015

Why I don’t plan to publish in Spanish anymore (in 2015 and beyond)

When I wrote my post on why I believe it is important that we take holidays and weekends off, and how overwork really tired me, I mentioned 5 goals I had for this year. Among these, I mentioned how I wasn’t planning to publish book chapters, and write in Spanish. A few Mexican colleagues of mine have raised their eyebrows and wondered why I was planning to do this. Their argument (very valid) is that by publishing only in English, my writing benefits a smaller portion of the Mexican population (given that Mexico’s language is Spanish).

AcWri

I understand my colleagues’ argument and agree with it to a certain extent. I teach students (at the undergraduate and graduate level) whose command of English may not be perfect, and I would probably want to publish key pieces for them to read in Spanish. I live in a country where the main language is Spanish, where the literacy in English may be reduced. I want to have policy impact in Mexico, and it is quite likely that legislators, senators, government officials will only read Spanish. But there’s also the other side of the coin, and one that I’ve been thinking about for a very long time.

The reason why I decided to stop writing and publishing in Spanish has to do both with the perception that the only language in which I publish is Spanish, and the reduced readership (as English is, whether we like it or not, the lingua franca of academic publishing). Another colleague told me last year “but … you’ve ONLY published in Spanish” (this isn’t true, as I’ve published a lot of pieces in English). I have to admit that hearing this really stung me (particularly for the implication that publishing in Spanish would somehow be easier). But, once I overcame the sting of being told I didn’t have enough publications in English, I realized that I want my work to have GLOBAL impact. I want my scholarship to have international influence. I want my work to be widely cited. And yes, if you look at my Google Scholar Citations profile, my pieces in Spanish have been more widely cited than my articles and book chapters in English. But I have to admit, I do think that in due time, my English-language publications will be more cited.

Working and filing journal articles

For better or worse, English is the main language of academia nowadays. I think publishing at least one or two pieces in Spanish makes sense for a foreign scholar who studies Latin American countries, or a scholar whose first language isn’t Spanish (even if they’re based in Latin America). It legitimizes their scholarship as “being in the know” (given that they are able to publish scholarship in the language of the countries they study).

But in my case, I’m 100% bilingual (Spanish and English), and quite frankly, I have made the decision that I prefer to have international recognition and have my work be more global rather than just seeking policy impact in Mexico. Given that the vast majority of academics worldwide will read English and not Spanish (unless they study Latin America), the probabilities of me getting cited would probably increase if I publish more in English. This is completely a gamble, as I don’t actually know if this exercise will be deleterious or not.

But I want to take the risk. I want to see if I can increase my citation counts by publishing more in English than I do in Spanish. I have a few pieces forthcoming that are in Spanish (in press, particularly), and I already had committed to two additional pieces in Spanish (and a book). But my writing in 2015 will be entirely in English.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – February 27, 2015