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Search Results for: writing

Synchronizing my digital and analog weekly and daily planner

Some people who see how my daily workflow happens in real life seem to be taken aback by the fact that I synchronize my digital and analog daily and weekly plans. To them, it would appear as though I take longer to plan my life than to actually execute it. This isn’t the case. It’s […]

Resources for Educators

These posts are specific to people who may not teach what I teach (e.g. who aren’t in the public policy, public administration, political science or human geography fields). Syllabus Design Lessons learned from designing a qualitative data analysis and interpretation graduate course In this blog post I share my experience developing a new graduate course […]

Creating a syllabus for a new course: The answer-seeking method

A few months ago, University Affairs (the premiere higher education magazine in Canada) asked me if I would be willing to write something for them. I wrote about how I use storytelling techniques to create a syllabus. The syllabus-writing-as-storytelling (SWAS) method works very well when you know EXACTLY the kind of course you will be […]

Resources for Undergraduate Students

This page is intended to help undergraduate students navigate the university experience. These posts aren’t specific to Academic Writing, or Literature Reviews, but they are more “general advice” type of posts. My page on Reading Heuristics for Undegraduates can be found by clicking here. Taking effective notes In this post I summarize how I take […]

Should qualitative data be subjected to the same transparency standards as quantitative?

If you’ve followed me on Twitter for any length of time, you’ll know I’m someone who is very much into open access, open science, transparency, replicability and traceability. I strongly believe that we should make our research as open and transparent as possible so that people can replicate our findings (or fail to replicate, as […]

Surviving and Thriving in Academia

I have been a very strong advocate for balance in academic and personal lives. I’m also a proponent of gender equity, a champion of marginalized academics. I promote empathy and kindness and community building. These posts are related to my experiences facing challenges as a queer academic of color in a globalized academic world. I […]

The 30 minute challenge: Achieving short-term goals

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a strategy I use to keep myself motivated: the Quick Wins method. I use this method because I am actually someone who faces enormous challenges in keeping himself focused and motivated. Because I have so many different research interests and I study a relatively broad range of issues, […]

KonMari your campus desk and office: The benefits of decluttering your academic life

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I often post photographs of what I’m doing, reading, and (often times) eating. Yesterday, I posted photos of how I had cleaned up my campus office (I’m officially on holidays, although I had to come into the office for 3 days in a row […]

Keeping yourself motivated: The Quick Wins method

One of the issues I struggle with the most is motivation. I am organized, I keep all my plans, schedules, notes, fieldwork scribbles in my Everything Notebook, but sometimes I feel like I have so much to do I just get overwhelmed. While I have learned to break down my workload by the month, week, […]

Higher education and academia

I write extensively on the challenges that we face in academic life, and the frustrations we have to deal with on a daily basis. This page is intended to collect my blog posts on the topic. Three hot takes on the wrong-headed assumptions that incoming undergraduates and graduates have research skills. Few things make me […]

Teaching Public Policy, Public Administration and Public Management

I have taught Public Policy, Public Management and Public Administration for more than a decade now, and I have always used my blog as a mode of self-reflective engagement. This particular page collates my thoughts on how to improve my own teaching and what kinds of things I want to teach my students. Here, I […]

Literature Reviews

While literature reviews are part of just about every single scholarly manuscript, I thought I’d put together a collection of blog posts that I have been writing to teach my students how to undertake a literature review. This page links all the posts associated with how to write a solid literature review, from searching for […]

Organization and Time Management

This page is intended to collate my posts on time management, organizational skills, and workflow design. I have written about how I organize my books, my journal articles and book chapters, how I approach digital document management, and how I plan my academic and personal lives. If you’re looking for my Everything Notebook™ posts, click […]

Resources

I have blogged a lot about a broad variety of different topics. Many people ask me if I can point them out to specific blog posts in a certain area, and it’s hard for me to remember or to have them handy. To that end, I have decided to create a Resources page. Here, you […]

Policy analysis as a clinical profession

I just finished reading Dr. Iris Geva-May‘s 2005 edited book “Thinking Like a Policy Analyst. Policy Analysis as a Clinical Profession“. I have always respected the work of Dr. Geva-May, as she is someone I know from my PhD days through Dr. Michael Howlett (perhaps the most prolific and influential scholar of public policy worldwide). […]

In defense of the research manager and administrative assistant positions in academia

I just ran a workshop at CIDE on the governance of e-waste in Mexico and the US. This workshop is a component of a project that was funded by a Collaborative Grant of the University of California UCMEXUS/CONACYT programme. The intellectual input was provided by my co-principal investigator, Kate O’Neill from University of California Berkeley, […]

My experience at the 2016 Public Management Research Conference (Aarhus, Denmark) #PMRC2016

I am a political scientist and a human geographer who studies comparative public policy and has an academic home in a department of public administration. This degree of interdisciplinarity makes me feel, to be perfectly honest, a bit like the illegitimate child in my division. I do know the literature in public administration and public […]

How to respond to reviewer comments: The Drafts Review Matrix

As I have been sharing my academic workflow with my blog readers, I realized that much of what I have been writing may be of help not only to PhD and Masters’ students, or early career scholars (postdoctoral fellows and assistant professors) but also to my own undergraduate students. I have decided that I will […]

Synthesizing different bodies of work in your literature review: The Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump (CSED) technique

Since I’m writing a series of posts on literature reviews (and undertaking a few of my own), I figured I could expand on how you can combine citation tracing, concept saturation, results’ mind-mapping with a method that Professor Elaine Campbell showcases in her excellent post “How I use Excel to manage my literature review“. I […]

Designing and implementing a Publications Planner

Several scholars have written about how they plan their own publications, and I was a bit wary of writing a piece that would address how I plan my own publications stream and trajectory. Professor Erin Marie Furtak wrote on the Chronicle of Higher Education about how she has 11 types of pieces (categories) that she […]

How to do a literature review: Citation tracing, concept saturation and results’ mind-mapping

There is a number of academics (and coaches and consultants) who have both a strong presence online and do a marvellous job of writing excellent blog posts as guidance for undergraduate, graduate students and early career professors. Two of my favourite who write specifically about literature reviews are How To Do a Literature Review (written […]

My Fall 2016 schedule: building flexibility into my calendar

One of the criticisms I received when I first published my weekly template was that I had never built buffers into my calendar. It is, in many ways, a fair criticism. You can’t be ready to do what you’re scheduled to do All The Time. Here’s the backstory to why I wrote such a strict […]

Remunicipalization in Latin America: Where are we now and where are we going? (my #LASA2016 talk)

I am certainly out-conferenced, but I would not have participated in this year’s Latin American Studies Association (LASA) conference if I hadn’t committed to join a great panel chaired by Clara Irazabal from Columbia University and organized by my friend and coauthor Marcela Gonzalez-Rivas from University of Pittsburgh. It was in New York City (Manhattan) […]

My own workflow: Strategically reading and summarizing the literature

I remember when I was doing my PhD I wanted to Read All The Things. This was particularly true during my very first year, when I started preparing for my comprehensive exams. I was (and in many ways, still am) a walking, living and breathing literature review. I love reading, and since I was lucky […]

My daily workflow: Budgeting time and scheduling projects

The fact that I have many different interests and that I am working on a broad variety of projects makes me more prone to letting things slip away. Thus, to protect my own time from others, and to stop me from procrastinating and making my life easier when working, I budget time for each thing […]