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My viewpoint on emotions in scholarly research

While perusing Pat Thomson’s blog, I came across a blog entry in which she describes what she calls “emotional research” (e.g. “research about which the researcher feels emotional about“). Pat’s post rings familiar, as I often feel a strong degree of emotion attached my own scholarly work.

Basic sanitation services for rural populations

Photo credit: Gates Foundation on Flickr

Of course I feel emotional. While most academics who read my stuff would probably call my research approach along the lines of positivist scholarship where I strive to maintain myself as unbiased and non-subjective as possible, I do recognize that there are biases that one needs to acknowledge. I learned to do this early in my career. In my training as a graduate student, I took several courses on qualitative research methods. One of the main points the professor made during his lectures was that one needed to recognize oneself’s scholarly position. This is common practice in disciplines like anthropology and sociology, although I have seen political science scholars also openly declaring their own position.

Philippines - Waste picker in Patayas, Manila

Waste picker in Patayas, Manila. Photo credit: Global Environmental Facility on Flickr

It’s no secret to anyone that I have publicly declared my own research position and what drives and fires my research focus: I strive to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor. I want to see poverty alleviated and, if possible, eradicated. I want to address global inequalities and inequities. My research is driven by an intense desire to increase access to proper sanitation. Water poverty pains me and I want to help reduce it. Informal waste recyclers’ frequently face inhumane working conditions, thus making them vulnerable populations. I am interested in empowering the disenfranchised, and thus I strongly believe that my research benefits from the raw emotions that I feel whenever I am faced with, for example, the realities of poor communities with little access to water.

I wrote a little monologue on Twitter that I think complements my thoughts nicely.

I found some nice insights on this piece on qualitative methods in leadership research by Dr. Sonia Ospina (someone I consider a solid scholar) on the topic of recognizing your own position.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 21, 2013

Increase your conference-paper-to-journal-article conversion rate

How I write an academic paperNote that I said “increase”, not “increasing” in the title of this post. I was HORRIBLE at doing this, although lately I’ve been improving. I have committed this mistake in the past, where I write some phenomenal conference papers, and then I let them sit there, languishing. Worst. Decision. Ever. I have two conference papers (one from 2005 and one from 2006) that would have been stellar (and well-cited) journal articles, had I put in the work, effort and hours to make them into journal manuscripts and send them off.

So, in order to increase my own conference-paper-to-journal-article conversion rate (which should be 1 to 1, always!), here is what I am doing:

1) Only accepting conference invitations where I actually have to write a paper.
There’s plenty of conferences where you just have to give a talk and prepare a few Power Point slides. Now, I only go to conferences where I present a paper that I need to write.

2) Submitting the conference paper BEFORE the conference to a journal.
I do this because I know that if I don’t do it, I will feel that I have already completed my work, and as we know, conference papers don’t count, publications do.

3) Using the conference’s feedback and the peer-reviewers’ comments to improve the paper if I get a R&R or a rejection.
My thinking here is – if I managed to write a fantastic paper, and it’s accepted prima facie, all the better. But if not, if it gets a revise-and-resubmit or a rejection, I can use the conference feedback to improve the paper and resubmit.

If you have any tips to increase your conference-paper-to-journal-article conversion rate, please do share on the comments section!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 19, 2013

#PhDTruths My response to @TaraBrabazon’s @TimesHigherEd piece

A few days ago, I posted a few tweets on my stream with the hashtag #PhDTruths before I read the Times Higher Education piece by Dr. Tara Brabazon (which came out right about then). I normally love Professor Brabazon’s pieces (I’ve promoted them before on my Twitter feed), but this piece rubbed me the wrong way. Surely, there are a few gems (particularly around the politics of completing a doctorate), and Professor Brabazon gets into the heart of why one shouldn’t always seek to be supervised by SuperProfessor. That said, I think that it is more important to remind PhD students that both supervisors and themselves are humans and to take a more human approach to supervising/achieving a PhD. These are my tweets in Storify form.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 14, 2013

Is working over the holidays a norm in academic life?

River overflow 4Academics work really hard, it’s a fact. Ever since I became an academic (e.g. ever since I started working in a research setting, which was two years before I even completed my undergraduate degree), my expectations of holidays were pretty much erased. I worked in a research lab where I was doing bench-scale wastewater treatment using activated-sludge-processes. I would wake up at 5:30am, drive to the lab, pick up the truck, travel to the city’s sewerage collection lagoons and sample raw municipal effluent.

I would run traditional tests (COD, BOD5, dissolved oxygen, etc.) and then I would run the sample through a bench-scale treatment plant. This process took me about 4 hours, so during a normal day, I would run this process 3 times. I worked 16-18 hour days, and this seemed to me quite normal (I didn’t do this year-round, but only during critical times). When I completed my undergraduate honors thesis, I was completely wiped out from sustaining this kind of workload. I also took more courses than I was supposed (8 instead of 6) so I could finish my undergraduate degree earlier. And I did dance, theatre, volleyball and other extracurricular activities on top of my school and scientific work. My idea of holidays was getting time to catch up with homework.

Research using the Cornell Notes methodAs I moved through the academic ladder (from undergraduate to PhD student to professor), I have always maintained a heavy workload. While I’ve worked hard at saying “no” to any commitments that don’t move forward my career, I do perceive that I need to work many hours a day (and 7 days a week, sometimes) to catch up. Work-life balance in academia is a thorny issue, and an ellusive one at that (just read this, this, this and this piece).

Of course, there’s always someone gloating that their academic life isn’t stressful. I love what I do, and for the most part, I manage my stress quite well (exercise, spending time with my parents and my friends, and extracurricular interests do the trick for me for the most part).

We wouldn’t be academics if it weren’t for the love of it, let’s face it. With the heavy workloads we have, having your heart in it is a requirement. I thought about what I do over the holidays (and what I plan to continue doing) in order to avoid academic burnout. These are a few tips (you can read others over at Jo Van Every’s site, and you may find also some striking similarities – great minds do think alike).

1. If you can’t disconnect for a few weeks, at least do it for a few hours every day

It is a fact that we need down time to recharge. We sometimes need to completely disconnect. This is much more difficult for me during the summer break, as I do have fieldwork to do, writing commitments, grant proposals to read and write, just to mention a few. Over the December holidays this is easier for me as I normally spend Christmas and New Year with my Mom, my brother, his wife, and my two adorable nephews (aged 5 and 2). Spending time with family is one of the ways in which I disconnect. Now, as anybody with toddlers/young kids will tell you, my telling them that Uncle Raul needs to work doesn’t really compute in their brain. They want to play with me, period. Even if I bring my laptop with me, both L and E come into my room and ask me to play with them. And, well, deadlines be damned, I leave my research behind and play with them. Of course, I have to come back in the late evening and early morning so as to catch up. But at least I get a few hours respite by playing with my nephews. You can perhaps schedule your writing as I do, very early in the morning so that you can write when the family doesn’t require you.

2. Schedule your time to work a reasonable number of hours.

During the holidays, I may not want to work 100 hours a week. And even though there’s still debate on whether academics can actually work 40 hour weeks, I still strive to balance my time. During the holidays I make sure that I maintain my writing quota (time-wise, 2 hours a day). But if this is unachievable because of my commitments, I strive to schedule my time in such a way that I only work what is reasonable during “reduced hours” times (e.g. holidays). Holidays are usually when I can catch up on my perennial lack of sleep, so I only work as many hours as required to get stuff out, and not more.

3. Let people know that you are going on holidays and ask them to respect your time.

This used to be really hard for me when I was a PhD student. How on Earth was I supposed to tell my own doctoral committee or my PhD advisor that I was going on holidays without being scolded? But then I realized that my PhD advisor and my doctoral committee ALL took holidays. Actual, real holidays. Weeks where they spent time with their loved ones and disconnecting form the world. When I realized my own doctoral committee were humans (bright, hard-working humans, at that), I gave myself permission to be one. So now I set up a fairly firm auto-responder: I’m away on holidays, and I will NOT answer emails from anybody while I am away. Of course, I never word it that way, but that’s the underlying message. And there’s always something really urgent. But if somebody really needs me, they know how to get a hold of me in case of an emergency.

4. If you really must work during your holidays, make it a working holiday.

In 2013, unfortunately, I can’t really take much time off as I just got two grant proposals accepted, and I need to get going on ethics review board, drafting interview protocols, I need to do field research, and I have six papers to write, a grant proposal to finish. So, my working holidays will involve spending time at my parents’ places (both of them are academics) and also working from home in Aguascalientes. But I also have invited a good friend of mine (also a professor) to come visit me for a few days. This ensures that we both do some work for a few hours a day, but at the same time, that we also take some time off to just do some touristy stuff.

Sunset in Vancouver and North Vancouver

Work-life balance is a challenge, but one that we academics must face and tackle. And I know that it will be a challenge for me too, as I face the next three weeks of holidays.

Happy summer!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 14, 2013

Canada Day 2013: A painful reminder of the demise of Canadian studies programming

Today is Canada Day. While I no longer teach at a Canadian university, I’m still as Canadian as the maple leaf. I hold both a Masters and a PhD from a Canadian university, I was a faculty member at one of Canada’s premier higher education institutions (The University of British Columbia), and I continue to be affiliated faculty both with the Department of Political Science and the Program in Latin American Studies.

While studying Canada has never been the bulk of my research agenda, understanding Canadian public policy and Canadian environmental policy has always been part of my scholarly (both research and teaching) interests. I taught both (Canadian public policy and Canadian environmental politics and policy) at UBC for 6 years, and I always have been connected with the Canadian policy community (primarily in environmental affairs, but I also have examined urban development and health politics). Many faculty members in Canadian universities are close friends of mine and collaborators.

Canadian Flags, HBC

Photo credit: PinkMoose on Flickr

Thus, Canada Day is always a painful reminder of the decision of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to scrap the Understanding Canada – Canadian studies programme. In fact, the programme has been so thoroughly cancelled that you cannot find any legacy websites about the Understanding Canada programme on the website of DFAIT (Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade). Even the International Council for Canadian Studies’ database of centres for the study of Canada gives you a 404 error. The most enduring remnant of the 2012 decision to rescind funding to any Canadian studies program abroad (including Government of Canada’s scholarships) is the ICCS’s letter to Harper.

To this day, I remain astonished at the stupidity and lack of foresight of Harper and his Conservative government. At the time the programme was scrapped, I was still a Canadian faculty member and thus, while the cancellation did irk me, it did not affect my research agenda in a substantial way. Now that I’m a Mexican faculty member, and because of my obvious connections to Canada and to Canadian studies’ scholarship, the demise of the Canadian studies’ programme does actually substantially affect any further academic research I might want to undertake on Canada and its environmental politics.

Canadian Flag flower bed

Photo credit: SonSon on Flickr

When DFAIT announced the decision, it came in a crudely worded email simply announcing to the ICCS President that DFAIT had decided to abolish the Understanding Canada Program. There is absolutely no smart, coherent, evidence-based, sound rationale why Canada would be better served by cancelling a program dedicated to, you know, study Canada. It’s not the first stupid policy decision of the Canadian government, but it is one that will definitely have enduring negative effects.

At the time the Understanding Canada programme was cancelled, I felt embarrassed that the government of the country that adopted me would make such dumb decision. And right now, I feel deeply saddened by the fact that Canadians have not removed Stephen Harper and the Conservative government. The continuous, relentless and vicious attack that this government has launched on Canadian scholars and Canadian studies is bewildering and inexplicable.

Additional reading: I found a couple of articles on the demise of the Canadian Studies – Understanding Canada programme here and here. And you can read what DFAIT now funds here.

On Canada Day, I send my deepest regrets to my fellow Canadian scholars in Canada, and to scholars of Canadian studies abroad. Sincerely, I wish that the funding to the Understanding Canada programme had never been slashed.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 1, 2013

On academic research, policy-relevance, real-world impact, and knowledge dissemination

I’m passionate about sharing my research (and I’m very passionate about my research as well), so whenever I see online discussions about the topic, I almost always jump on. Unfortunately, I have very little time to write right now about this topic, but the quote and subsequent conversation between Mark Carrigan, Javier Stanziola, Eleonora Belfiore and Tim McCormick all really hit the nail in the head.

Yes, disseminating knowledge itself doesn’t necessarily mean that our knowledge (and research) will have real-world impact. It does, however, open the possibility to probabilities that it can, in fact, have an impact. In my view, I would rather share my research with the world in hopes that it can then have an impact, than to keep my research findings jailed in a non-accessible, highly-jargon-laden book.

My PhD advisor always told me he wanted me to conduct empirically-sound, methodologically-rigorous, theoretically-grounded, policy-relevant research. That’s the kind of work I strive for my own students to conduct. That is why I am on Twitter, on Facebook, on Pinterest. I use social media to be a bit more of a public intellectual. I couldn’t care less to have my research locked away, I want my work to be used to improve environmental conditions worldwide.

These are just very brief, drafty musings that I just carved in 10 minutes, but do feel free to chime in on the comments section.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 30, 2013

The ethics of academic peer-review: Some tips and best practices

Academia is an industry of peers. We review each other’s work and (hopefully) we seek to raise the standard for writing, for research design, for methodological advances, and for theoretical development. I peer-review anywhere from 10 to 50 manuscripts per year, at least one book manuscript per year, and I sit on four editorial boards (all of them internationally recognized journals). All of the journals I peer-review for (and I submit my own work to) use the double-blind method, although if you know the field well enough, you can certainly guess who wrote which manuscript.

Doing research

Unfortunately, I’ve been seeing some pretty bad practices in the peer-review process. Not only the extremely lengthy time that journals take to process manuscripts (2 years? seriously?!) but in some cases, editors and reviewers communicate in a rather harsh, nasty and unbecoming-of-a-reputed-scholar manner. I have complained about this on Twitter quite a few times. As I’ve said before, I know for a fact I’m a tough reviewer, but I’m never an unfair one, nor do I write nasty reviews.

Given that I conduct peer reviews on a regular basis (at least one every month, and sometimes once a week), I thought I’d provide some tips and best practices on peer-review.

1. You can be a rigorous reviewer without being a nasty one.

Remember, you are assessing the quality of the manuscript, not the author him/herself. You are supposed to evaluate how sound the methodology is, whether the research has been submitted elsewhere, if the theoretical grounding is there, and if the results are credible (and obviously, correct). Pat Thompson has a great post on this aspect.

2. Don’t accept to peer review manuscripts that fall outside of your area of expertise, nor should you force the author to read your own work if it doesn’t apply.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve received comments from peer reviewers who tell me “the author should have cited Professor X“. This commentary often unblinds the review because I know well (after a thorough literature review) that Professor X does NOT write about Topic Y (the one I wrote about). And it’s unethical do to so, anyways.

3. Do NOT sit on a review for months at a time. Review accurately and in a timely fashion. Or simply decline the review, if you do NOT have the time to do it in a timely manner.

peer review

Academic journals already suffer from a lack of timeliness. Papers that are ACCEPTED in 2012 sometimes are told that they will get published in 2014. I had a journal editor tell me “we have basically covered all of 2013 and 2014” by February 2012. If I am going to submit a manuscript with time-sensitive data, you can tell this is NOT the journal I am going to send my work to, even if it is a solid outlet.

4. If you have questions about how to conduct a peer review in an ethical manner, ASK.

I started peer-reviewing when I was finishing my Masters’ degree, so I have had quite a few years of practice, but whenever I needed advice, I always turned to senior scholars. I am posting here some resources here that I really enjoyed reading.

– The Four Jobs of a Peer Reviewer.

– Ethics of Peer Review – A Guide for Manuscript Reviewers.

– Committee on Publication Ethics – Ethical Guidelines for Peer Review.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 25, 2013

Collective Action and the Fate of the Commons in Latin America (Call for Papers)

Dr. Juan Camilo Cardenas (Universidad de los Andes, Colombia) is a friend of mine and fellow IASC member, and a specialist in experimental commons research. He asked me to circulate this call for papers.

Collective Action and the Fate of the Commons in Latin America

CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Issue in Ecological Economics (in honor of Elinor Ostrom)
Invited editors: Juan Camilo Cardenas and Roldan Muradian

Current trends in economic development in most Latin American countries encompass both significant opportunities and threats. The high rates of economic growth that have characterized the last decade have been driven by high prices of natural resources and a commodity boom. The rise of income has offered more opportunities of investment in social and environmental protection. However, a path of economic development that relies heavily on the primary sector also amplifies the pressures on natural ecosystems, especially through an ever expansion of the agricultural, infrastructure and mining frontiers. This entails threats to the integrity of ecosystems, but also to the populations that inhabit them. An important fraction of the region’s poorest depend highly on the extraction of resources for their subsistence and the support of their cultural and economic systems of life. In addition, in Latin America, a considerable part of valuable natural resources are under communal property regimes, require collective action for their management or are embedded in nested (polycentric) governance arrangements. Due to the trends described above, such socio-ecological systems are exposed to increasing external and internal pressures. The way collective governance arrangements respond to such pressures will determine the fate of the commons in the region. This is therefore a vital issue for the future of biodiversity and ecosystem services, not only in Latin America but also in the world as a whole, since the region holds a remarkable share of the global environmental commons.

Ecological Economics (the journal of the International Society for Ecological Economics) has expressed interest in increasing the incidence of studies from Latin America in the journal, since authors from the region have been historically underrepresented. Its editor has asked J.C. Cardenas and R. Muradian to prepare a special issue composed by authors from Latin America or working in the region on a subject of overarching interest. The invited editors have chosen to focus the special issue on the challenges of managing the environmental commons in Latin America. This special issue will be composed by 6-9 articles. Contributions are expected from different disciplines and methodological approaches, and dealing with forests, marine ecosystems, páramos, irrigation schemes or other socio-ecological systems whose management involve collective action in the region. The following are some of the overarching questions to be addressed by this special issue:

• How are common-pool resource management systems dealing with new internal and external threats derived from the current patterns of economic development?
• What is the role of collective action institutions in emerging conflicts over natural resources?
• What can experimental methods and behavioral approaches reveal about the management of the commons in real life situations?
• How are emerging polycentric governance regimes for the management of the global commons (biodiversity; climate change) affecting local collective action regimes?
• Are new economic incentives for the conservation of ecosystems (such as payments for ecosystem services) reinforcing or undermining the institutions for the management of common pool resources?

An e-mail of intent should be sent to Juan Camilo Cardenas (jccarden@uniandes.edu.co) and Roldan Muradian (r.muradian@maw.ru.nl) by August 15th, 2013. We expect to receive drafts of the completed papers by September 30th, 2013. Submitted papers will be sent to reviewers.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 24, 2013

Dealing with rejection in academic writing (and academia, in general)

Nobody that I know likes rejection. I’ll have to admit that I was very lucky through high school, undergraduate and graduate school. I worked hard, and that work led to high grades (I completed my PhD with an A+ average GPA). I always felt that I was pretty invincible. Then, I had to rewrite a doctoral dissertation because it needed work. After a lot of work, rethinking and rehashing my argument, I obtained my PhD (not without a tonne of effort, tenacity and will to succeed). I suppose that you could say my academic writing was rejected for not being up to the standard up until I got the doctorate.

"Journal of Universal Rejection" coffee mug

"Journal of Universal Rejection" coffee mug

Photos: credit Tilemahos Efthimiadis

But I also felt lucky throughout graduate school and as I started my career as an early-career-scholar that I had never actually experienced rejection in the academic writing that I sent out to the world. Paper I submitted for publication to a journal, paper that I got accepted. I had almost a zero rejection rate, for a few years.

This year, my record both in grant writing and in journal article publishing got a bit of a clobbering. I got three grant proposals that I had really put my heart and soul into them (and that I thought were spectacularly well written) rejected. Not by much, mind you. And not because the projects weren’t worthy, but because of budgetary constraints and policy priorities of the granting agencies.

I also had a journal article manuscript fully rejected from a journal and felt devastated. After all, this year I had had pretty much a “accepted-as-is”, a “accepted-with-minor-changes” and an “accepted-with-major-changes-but-essentially-it’s-in”. So the rejection really hurt. And the paper is a really nice analysis that I thought was a slam-dunk, which is what really stung more.

In talking with a number of senior scholars at the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) Conference in Fujiyoshida-shi, Japan, they reminded me of Elinor Ostrom and what she said about rejection letters – they’re part of academia. In fact, when I first met Lin, I do remember that she did say that – something to the extent of “if you only knew the kind of rejection letters I’ve received for my manuscripts!“. So I felt much better. If even Elinor Ostrom got papers rejected (or grants), and look the kind of academic impact she had in the world, I should learn to deal with rejection and accept it as part-and-parcel of academic life.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 22, 2013

“But mostly, just Grant Me”: Dealing with grant writing as an early career scholar

I have written grant proposals for research projects and successfully obtained funding to conduct research before, without much problem. But in the past couple of years, I’ve experienced my share of rejection. I will admit I wasn’t used to rejection (neither in publishing nor in grant-writing), so being denied funding came as a shock to me. This can be the result of several factors: ever-shrinking budgets for granting agencies, changes in research directions, and an increase in new applicants as well are factors that come to mind. I would like to think it’s not that I’m writing worse grants than I used to!

While I could conduct my research without much additional funding, writing grants is always in my mind. There are a number of things that, while I have outstanding support from my university, I can’t do without external funding. Asking my university to fund a large-scale, multi-site examination of sanitation, wastewater and hygiene conditions in six countries would be a little bit too much. I do need external funds to conduct this kind of project.

Mostly Just Grant Me

Comic (c) Jorge Cham and used for illustrative purposes only. Click the comic to go to the original site.

So when I came across Jorge Cham’s “The Prayer of a Professor” I couldn’t help but laugh, and feel that I relate SO MUCH. I made a colour photocopy and posted it on my office’s door. It’s funny that the professor prays “but mostly, just Grant Me”, as I often feel this way. Not because I feel external pressure from CIDE to write grants and get projects funded (publications are the yardstick I’m measured against, as well as my other scholarly activities – service, teaching, reaching out to the public). But because I really think there are just things we need to search funding for. I consider myself an empirical researcher, so I enjoy going on the field, learning from interviews, participant observation, focus groups. I am delving into field experiments. I’m a comparativist, so I often need to travel to different regions and countries to observe how waste and wastewater are generated and managed. So, the need for funding is always there.

How to deal with eternal grant writing processes (at this point I have 2 grants under review, 4 grants to write and one to revise, all for coordinated projects that are all part-and-parcel of my larger research project) as an early career researcher? I’ve thought about this over the course of this week, and I think the only advice I can offer is: don’t give up.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 21, 2013