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On the value of annotated bibliographies as scholarly outputs

Recientemente I wrote a Twitter thread on the value of annotated bibliographies, which I wanted to turn into a blog post because I wanted to really strengthen my argument. As most of you who read my blog post know, I HAVE written about annotated bibliographies, literature reviews, systematic reviews, etc.

In my view, an annotated bibliography, a literature review and a systematic review are three important exercises in systematizing all the material we read. In my view, ABs, LRs and SRs have increasing degrees of complexity, as I show below.

Annotated Bibliography Lit Review Systematic Review

Source: My own construction.

This thread started at the request of one of my students, as the tweets below show.

For me, producing an annotated bibliography and/or gnerating a bank (or set) of rhetorical precis (or a bank of article and book chapter summaries written in index cards) is the prerequisite step BEFORE writing the literature review.Often times, my students simply prefer to show me their Excel Dump.

CSED and reviewing the literature

Personally, I very strongly believe that Annotated Bibliographies are legitimate scholarly outputs. For one of my projects on water conflicts, I asked one of my research assistants to produce an annotated bibliography on the sociological concept of “framing” and “Frame Analysis”

Anybody who reads my AB on Comparative Ethnography can say “oh wow, there’s X author and Y author, and Z book and W chapter, and those are probably the first ones I should read”. It saves time for other scholars (including my own students).

The intermediate step between writing an annotated bibliography (or building a deck of index cards on a topic, or a bank of rhetorical precis, or a set of Synthetic Notes) and producing the Literature Review is the DIGESTION, ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS of everything they’ve read.

Overall, I strongly believe in the value of teaching our students to do Annotated Bibliographies, THEN Literature Reviews, THEN Systematic Reviews. My website has resources on each one of these, and the links above in the tweets shown should also work. Hopefully this post will be of use to instructors and students alike!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 17, 2020

What are the differences between a Research Trajectory, a Research Programme and a Research Pipeline?

A few days ago, I saw a post in a discussion forum on how to write a Research Trajectory document. The conversation that ensued prompted me to consider how *I* viewed the different documents that we produce not only for job-seeking purposes (the Research Programme) but also for advancement reasons (the Research Trajectory), and for our daily, weekly, monthly and yearly planning (the Research Pipeline).

#AcWri at the hotel in Copenhagen

Other people may see these documents differently, but this is how I have conceptualized the differences, however subtle. The table below gives an idea of how I conceptualize them.

Research Workflow

Source: My own creation.

A Research Trajectory, in my view, is the conceptual part, where you draw connections between what you started researching, and how your thinking has evolved throughout the years.

To me, a Research Pipeline is the sequence of publications and projects you have planned, and what you’ve already gotten out, and it has a sequential feel to it, much like a Gantt Chart. In my conceptual model, the Research Pipeline is fed by the Research Trajectory, which is more “macro”, large scale.

For example, let’s look at my own Research Trajectory. I started doing research on how we could apply Integrated Assessment (a tool normally used to understand climate change) to questions of industrial restructuring of inter-linked industries in geographically-close locations under multiple stressors. That was my PhD dissertation.

I have always been driven by questions of collaboration. What makes agents collaborate to properly manage resources? So my next research project after the PhD was focused on how to collaboratively govern wastewater (remember my conversation with the Ostroms?).

Once I got a better understanding of how wastewater was governed, I moved towards a different medium (solid waste). And then I moved to bottled water, its governance and politics. To me, you can understand a researcher’s maturation/evolutionary process by looking at their research trajectory.

I’m going to give another example. Say that for your PhD thesis you worked on the history of water in Aguascalientes. And your first book project, based on the dissertation, will be on the history of water in Aguascalientes over the first period (1880-1920). You could very well design a research trajectory that moves you to say, the history of waste governance in Aguascalientes, same period.

That’s probably going to take you at least 3 years to learn the literature, do the archival research necessary, etc. So your Research Pipeline may have a couple of articles from where you can then spin off your second book, the first one coming out on year 4 and the second one coming out on year 5, and then you can have the full manuscript, say by year 6 or 7. In my view, you’re moving historiographically from studying the history of resource governance across media, though you could also switch time periods, or cities, or do comparisons across time periods AND cities AND countries.

And then there’s the Research Program, which I see as a much shorter frame document where you say, “ok, to move into the politics of hazardous waste, I need to start doing fieldwork in a different city/country” and you establish the steps (per year/bi-annually) to get there.

So, my Research Program for the next 24 months involves
– Getting my book out on the politics of sanitation
– Writing up all the fieldwork from my waste pickers project
– Getting some more work done on the politics of bottled water.
(obviously surviving COVID-19, because yes that is also in my plans!)

To recap. In MY view (hopefully other people will agree)

  • Research Trajectory: big picture, topics, evolution of thinking, which new questions I want to investigate.
  • Research Pipeline: the timed, scheduled, planned outline of which articles, books, book chapters, papers you’re going to get done by when to achieve the goals you set in your Research Trajectory.
  • Research Program: shorter term plan of work to get done within a specific time-frame.

In sum: You feed your Research Program (Programme for us Canadians) off your Research Pipeline, which you create based on your Research Trajectory.

Hopefully this conceptualization will help fellow scholars develop their own documents!

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 17, 2020

Staying in touch with your writing: Opening the document on a regular basis

My oldest brother is a tenured, full professor at California State University Los Angeles, in Los Angeles, California (USA). As a result, we frequently talk about the challenges and joys of our lives as professors. This past week, we were chatting about all the stuff we need to submit for publication, and how difficult it is to get stuff out when you’ve been out of touch with your research for a while, particularly with a specific piece of research. I told my brother about Joli Jensen’s “Write No Matter What” and how I, personally, implement Jensen’s approach to “writing, no matter what”.

What I think becomes super stressful right now, and difficult, is to stay in touh with our writing. Normally, we’re always under stress. But with the current global pandemic of COVID-19, it is even harder as we implement “shelter-at-home” practices and (particularly those who do care work and have children) deal with the home components of working from home all the damn time.

AcWri setup

I told my brother that one way in which I, personally, have stayed in touch with my writing, is SIMPLY OPENING THE DOCUMENT I AM SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING ON. This sounds ridiculously easy enough and yet, I know from MY own experience that more often than not, we forget to open the document we must be working on, thinking “I will open it when I have the time”. Well, the reality has set in: we’re never really going to have the time, per se.

Workflow: Finishing a paper

We’re living in unprecedented times, and one chill, no-pressure way in which we can stay in touch with our writing, even if for only 5 to 15 minutes, is to open the document. Reading what we’ve written, checking what we could write, maybe spend those 15 minutes writing even if it’s only one sentence, this process keeps us in touch with our writing and our research. Even if we’re just at the data analysis stage, opening up Stata, or R, or looking at the dataset in Excel, or the qualitative data corpus in N*Vivo or MAXQDA, or the map in ArcGIS or QGIS, we can still stay in touch with our research.

Simply by opening the damn document.

I know for a fact, this is hard to do for me, more often than not. But over the past few weeks, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Instead of stressing out over what I have not finished, I simply try to stay in touch with my writing by opening the document on a regular (usually daily) basis.

Important to remember: we are living under a lot of stress. The purpose of this strategy is to relieve us from additional pressure. I think we’re going to have to find ways to write, but these need to be tamed and mediated by how much stuff we need to do at home, ON TOP OF OUR SCHOLARLY COMMITMENTS. As I told my brother: it’s not “write 1,000 words per day”. It’s not “finish this paper this weekend”. It’s “let’s open the document, check where we are, and how we can move it forward slowly, no pressure, no stress”.

I have always promoted a chill, no-stress approach to writing (see my post on how we can develop a writing practice by focusing for 15 minutes, writing 125-250 words). I think this strategy is going to have to be the way forward within these circumstances of extreme uncertainty.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 17, 2020

Writing and revising I: Write to withstand scrutiny from an audience that cares

I find working at home every single day, all day, staying with my Mom, in my childhood room’s home office, and not teaching this semester, extraordinarily weird. COVID-19 (“the coronavirus”) is keeping me and millions of other people in Mexico and around the world locked inside our houses to avoid contagion and break the chain of viral transmission. In my case, after months of battling psoriasis-dermatitis-eczema, this also means that I have had the mindset, time, books, articles, notes, and computer equipment to write.

FINALLY.

Library Cubicles at El Colegio de Mexico

I feel like I have been having writing breakthroughs and I feel incredibly happy.

I also have this feeling that I have been gaining new insights into academic writing. One of the most valuable, I think and that I would like to share with my readers and Twitter/Facebook followers is to find our own voicet we should be ready and looking to write for an audience that cares, and write with enough confidence, evidence, and argumentation, that our writing can withstand scrutiny. But not only critical examination from Reviewer 2, but also, from audiences that are friendly and care about us and our development.

Writing while in Berlin

On a regular basis, I ask fellow scholars to scrutinize my work, and provide me with feedback.

I VERY, VERY, VERY carefully choose the people I ask for advice. If I wanted to be emotionally obliterated by Reviewer 2 on a regular basis, I would. I don’t. I like receiving eedback from people who are super smart, but also who will be kind and generous and take care of not trying to make me feel like I’m stupid. I have many people in that particular posse, and I ask them depending on the topic. For example, on global environmental politics…

I mentioned above the Twitter IDs of a few scholars (of the many I that I am lucky to be able to ask!) that I have requested feedback from. Here, I included some in the water and waste fields. Again, these are scholars whose research I love and admire, and who respect my work and care about me enough to provide gentle, caring and meaningful yet critical feedback:

I find this to be both the best component of academia (having someone who will read your work with a critical eye and genuine care) and at the same time, the hardest. For newcomers into academia, students, early career scholars, it is hard to build a network. It has taken decades for me to build mine.

My #AcWri process integrating reading CSED

Finding a trible, a posse, is the challenge of modern academia, I believe. Encountering and engaging THOSE PEOPLE. Those individuals who will generously provide you with rigorous, challenging but nurturing feedback. Ideally, you should be surrounded by dozens of them, but I know this is just in an ideal world.

I am grateful that I do have my people. I can basically ask many scholars for advice, knowing that they will read my work carefully, offer constructive advice, call my bullshit if they see it, and challenge my evidence, assumptions and argument. Obviously I am more than happy to do this for them as well.

Folks are willing to engage with your work generously (generally speaking).

This is very important if we are to transform academia from within.

Let’s do this.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 12, 2020

Pivoting away from specific research topics when fieldwork is impossible to do

Let me state something with absolute certainty: I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYONE SHOULD BE ENGAGING IN DOING PHYSICAL, OUTDOOR FIELDWORK RIGHT NOW. The personal risk that students, faculty, research associates, postdoctoral researchers, and staff would be facing would violate any and all standards of care for field research, given the current coronavirus pandemic. Not only would it put researchers at risk, but also the communities under study.

Waste picking in Madrid

Photos from trash bins from when I did fieldwork in Madrid, Spain, in February of 2016

On Twitter, I wrote a micro-thread responding to some (well-intentioned and well-meaning) scholars who suggested that it would be possible to simply pivot from physical, on-the-ground ethnography to digital under current conditions (i.e. widespread COVID-19 with high risk of contagion). As you may remember, I wrote about this earlier this month.

I study informal waste pickers’ individual and collective behaviours. There is no way I can continue to do this using digital ethnography. I investigate access (or lack thereof) to water and sanitation within very marginalized communities. Given COVID-19’s global reach.venturing on the field at the current moment of the pandemic would probably be an assured death sentence. I am immunocompromised. I have been VERY lucky that I have been able to do ethnography for years. I was going to deploy field experiments this year. I don’t think I can. I don’t think I SHOULD.

My own view (and obviously this is a conversation that students and their supervisors will need to have) is that the research question will need to shift to accommodate current conditions. This means, resorting to online interviews whenever possible. Or digital archives.

ut we need to be honest about the obstacles current social (and natural) sciences & humanities face:

– accessing physical archives may not be feasible anymore.
– undertaking participant observation may not be advisable anymore.
– deployment of field experiment may not happen

Sorry to be the dissenting voice, but I think we ought to rethink students (and our own) research projects to adapt to the fact that we are in the midst of a global pandemic. And my considerations don’t even factor in the fact that people may not be able to FOCUS on research (care work, personal worry, etc.)!

I will rummage through my datasets (qualitative, quantitative, photographs from archival sources and newspapers and maps) to see what I can make available, but I think we ought to rethink research projects. And I’m happy to be a sounding board if need be for methods’ discussions.

I want to add one thing that is specific to PhD committees, PhD and Masters/undergrad advisors and external examiners: if a student had to abruptly cut their fieldwork because, well, COVID-19, I very strongly believe that YOU HAVE THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO TAKE THIS INTO ACCOUNT. I can assure you, they would probably continue to do fieldwork if there were no shelter-in-place/quarantine requirements. We all end up being a bit risky with our projects (I know for a fact I take risks when doing ethnography in marginalized areas). But we need to be flexible, considerate/humane.

This is a time of global crisis and we need to reimagine not only research questions, but also the research methods we use and how we engage with our communities. Dr. Kate Parizeau (University of Guelph) and I call our method and framework of engagement Doubly Engaged Ethnography. Hopefully our journal article will be helpful to you all in engaging the tough question of how we do ethnography with vulnerable communities (and how we pivot away from physical fieldwork to a different method and perhaps, another research question).

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 6, 2020

Finishing a dissertation, thesis or book manuscript: A few tips and ideas to help with completion

Because of the COVID-19 lockdown, I have been working from home now basically every day. Since I’m staying at my Mom’s for the duration of the shelter-in-place period, and I have a full-fledged home office complete with bookshelves, desks and a desktop computer, printer, and wireless internet, I have been able to focus a bit more on writing than when I’m back in Aguascalientes and I go to campus on a daily basis.

Desk at my CIDE office

At the same time, I still have many pending deadlines. My psoriasis-dermatitis-eczema set me back basically 7 months behind on everything. I have two particular manuscripts long overdue, and a couple of revise-and-resubmit resubmissions I need to send back. But one specific milestone that I cannot postpone is the delivery of my coauthored water conflicts book. This particular manuscript had to be delivered before April 11th, 2020, so I have been writing non-stop. As I was finishing up, I realized that this process felt a lot like when I was completing my doctoral dissertation. I therefore wrote a Twitter thread that I am transcribing in this blog post. My advice is very similar to what I suggested when I described my process to generate a full first draft of a paper or article in 8 steps. Basically, I write in bits and pieces (memorandums) and then I assemble the entire manuscript once it takes reasonable shape.

But assembling this one reminded me of my experience finishing my doctoral dissertation. This post explains the roadblocks I faced too.

1) Assemble the entire document as soon as humanly possible.

I wrote my dissertation (and this is a co-written book) in bits and pieces. Therefore, a lot of what I have been doing with this book is ASSEMBLING. Assemblage refers not only to the process of copying and pasting, but also making sure that the text has coherence. It needs to read approximately as though it’s the same voice (in the case of coauthored books). Making sure that the writing flows and that there is homogeneity in voices (or if it is an edited volume, that all chapters share the same Red Thread/Throughline) takes a lot of time and thinking.

2) Don’t leave ALL the formatting to the end.

This is a common mistake a lot of people make, not only me. One of the rationales for leaving all the formatting to the end is that “we don’t want to waste valuable creative writing time”. WRONG. I spent WEEKS formatting tables, graphs, diagrams, headers, footers, headings. What’s taking me A LOT OF TIME with this book is the formatting, making sure it’s homogeneous throughout. Formatting includes making sure that all tables, graphs, maps, figures, illustrations are properly labeled. I spend an inordinate amount of time using the “Insert Title” function to label tables and figures and make sure that I can create a table of titles and a table of figures towards the end. I did this with my PhD dissertation, and now that I did it with the full water conflicts manuscript, I completely recalled what a pain this was.

Working set up at my home office (Aguascalientes)

3) Ensure that all the references are in your Mendeley (or Endnote, Zotero, Papers, Citavi, Refworks).

Reference cleaning and bibliography assembly are EXHAUSTING. I absolutely adore Mendeley and I have written both a handy guide on how to use it to write papers and a post on how I use the Cite-o-Matic function of Mendeley to “dialogue” with Word and insert references as I go. But having the discipline of reading, importing into Mendeley, and cleaning the reference, requires forethought and assigning time to this process. Otherwise, we end up spending hours uploading references we are missing. I am sure you all have done the “INSERT REFERENCE X HERE”. Yeah, I do that too. And if I don’t do it right there and then, I sometimes forget and then I have to spend an entire morning finding the piece in PDF format, uploading it to Mendeley and cleaning the reference.

4) Extract bits and pieces of each individual chapter’s conclusions and copy them into the final conclusion of the book.

Remember, the concluding chapter’s purpose is to say “these are the things we learned, and I did promise you you would learn these, so here they are”. With regards to conclusions, I’ve written before about how to write a concluding chapter for a book, and for a paper, but I also want to share wisdom that Dr. Pat Thomson shared as a response to my Twitter thread.

5) Print the entire thing ONE TIME for editing purposes.

I know, suggesting that you should print out your document is a bit of a heresy. I’m an environmental politics specialist, but I can’t edit on screen, so I recommend doing ONLY ONE printout, pointing OUT the errors, and then cleaning them. After doing that, I don’t print a second copy. I just generate a PDF. I know that there are people who can edit on screen, but I cannot.

I just want to add one thought that came to me as I was writing this blog post: this is a stressful time. If you can or need to finish a book manuscript or a thesis, I do hope that these tips will be useful to you, but more than anything, I recommend that you be kind to yourself. Finishing up such a major piece of work is hard and takes a lot of energy and it’s a draining process, so make sure to take time off once you’re done.

Good luck!

Writing laptop at home

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 6, 2020

On the importance of individual infrastructure in remote learning and teaching – what role for the university?

I am lucky that I am not teaching this semester, given how COVID-19 has thrown everything into disarray for so many scholars around the world. Not teaching during the first semester of the year is actually normal for me, and I recognize my huge privilege to be able to do this type of scheduling. For the past few years, I have moved all my teaching to the fall so that I can do fieldwork and academic conferences during the spring. Obviously, sometimes, students request my courses and therefore I have them added on to my spring schedule, something that forces me to rethink my fieldwork and travel season. Anyway, I was thinking about the importance of infrastructure now that we have been forced to do emergency remote teaching and learning.

RPV at U of A
Me teaching a Master class at the University of Alberta, Fall 2019

My tweet summarizes my concern:

Universities (and other learning organizations) thus have a democratizing and equalizing function: they provide infrastructure (computers, internet, library books/space) for EVERYONE. Being forced to go remote, we also forget structural inequalities across the student body and faculty. I remember one time, when a project officer for the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung told me “please have everyone participating in your workshop scan their IDs and send them to me”. What makes you (this project officer) think EVERYONE has a scanner/printer/robust wifi to scan-to-PDF and send? Jesus.

I shared a couple of anecdotes from when my Mom did her PhD at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, in Spain. When Mom was doing her doctorate in Madrid, she often times had to go work late at their local “locutorio” (a computer lab where computers and internet were available to rent). Simply because she didn’t have wifi at home to send her homework. Terrible.

Another anecdote from that epoch. Mom did her PhD in Spain (Madrid, Complutense) at the same time I was doing mine in Canada (Vancouver, UBC), and my oldest brother was doing his in the US (South Bend, Notre Dame). She had a laptop, and worked from her “piso” (apartment). one time, she was finishing a paper for a class late at night, and before she could save it to a USB her laptop died.

At 1 am.

She had to leave her house and go to a “locutorio” and rewrite her f****ng paper FROM SCRATCH. Mom had to walk alone through the streets of Madrid at 1 am so she could find a locutorio that would be open so she could rewrite her paper. She found one and rewrote the damn paper from scratch. She finished at 8 am, having had zero sleep, sent it out, printed it and then walked home, showered, went to class on zero hours of sleep. So yeah, am I very sensitive to students and staff and faculty’s disparities in technology and infrastructure? Absolutely.

My Mom’s experiences really reminded me of how stark these infrastructure inequities are.

The point of this blog post and my original tweet is to remind ourselves of two interrelated issues:

1) There is enormous heterogeneity in personal infrastructure for online learning and teaching. When we have to move our teaching to online platforms, we rely on OUR infrastructure including computer equipment and internet access, and we may not have the most ideal. Our students may have limited online access or no computing equipment. We MUST take into account these challenges they may face. This is also true for faculty AND staff.

2) My point wasn’t a critique of universities, but more of the governance of higher education system itself. Universities play a democratizing role by providing infrastructure. Governments should properly fund universities, colleges and schools so that they can pass on infrastructure improvements, subsidies and support to their students and faculty.

Anyway, challenging times ahead, and the discussion that arose from my tweet is extraordinarily enlightening. I encourage you to read my Twitter thread and responses to it, including quote tweets.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 4, 2020

Project management for academics II: Tracking and managing your time

In a previous life, I studied AND did project management for a living. I decided to apply my experience and expertise in this area to develop a series of blog posts on how to do project management within academia. My previous blog post on Managing A Research Pipeline can be found here. Synchronizing To-Do lists

A few weeks ago, I requested help from my #AcademicTwitter community on time-tracking apps

I have always loved computer software to track time, even though I used to do this the analog way. I had a shorthand notebook and I used to write what I spent my time on. I have had to do this for a number of employers (also known as “keeping track of your time in a time-sheet”. Keeping track of time (yes, even during the COVID-19 emergency!) may help us discern where our time is going. Personally, I like tracking time because it allows me to make a case AGAINST the culture of ““hours spent at your desk”. You can see the responses to my tweet for suggestions of apps. After testing a few applications, I zeroed in on two: Clockify and Toggl. I had used RescueTime before, ATracker, but I ended up just focusing on Clockify and Toggle. Both have Chrome extensions and desktop apps. These two are, in my view, the simplest ones.

Clockify

PROS:
  • Amazingly intuitive
  • Chrome extension
  • Easy to start, easy to stop

CONS:
  • I procrastinated and forgot to turn Clockify on, so OBVIOUSLY my added hours do not add up to 8 hours.
  • This would be the same problem with RescueTime, BTW.

Toggl

PROS:

  • amazingly intuitive, perhaps even more intuitive than Clockify
  • super easy to create a task and a project
  • easy to start, easy to stop
CONS:

  • so far, have not had any cons.
  • I also fixed my manual updates for Clockify.

Both desktop apps and Chrome extensions are intuitive, though I still think Toggl is a tiny tiny bit more intuitive.

toggl and clockify desktops

Conclusion: Evaluating Toggl vs. Clockify I love both of them and I will continue to use them, possibly interchangeably. What I should say, though, is that Clockify has an AMAZING blog with tips on time management. Moreover, they are not shy about promoting OTHER time-tracking apps, which to me shows an interest and care on the customer.

Both Clockify and Toggl have excellent customer support on Twitter.

My experience tracking my time

For me, tracking how I spend my time is something I am quite experienced about. I used to do it in grade school, high school and throughout my graduate degree. I sort of left it behind when I became a professor.

What time-tracking has given me again is the sense of where my time goes. Obviously during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place period, I am sure much of my time is going to be personal. But even now I can distinguish between when I am working on my own personal stuff, when I am doing scholarly work, and when I am doing housework and care work. To me, time-tracking apps are useful. Maybe they will be useful to you too.

But again, let me just remind you: regardless of what you spend your time on, WE ARE JUST TRYING TO SURVIVE THIS PANDEMIC. I wouldn’t stress over what you’re spending your time on, right about now. But if it helps you, maybe my review of Clockify and Toggl may be helpful.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 2, 2020

Mathematical epidemiology, the COVID-19 pandemic and the limits and uncertainties of models

I have been in isolation for the past week or so, because my immune system has always been compromised. I am doing this against the current wisdom provided by the Mexican secretariat of health, but following global approaches to facing the COVID-19 pandemic, because apparently, “these kinds of measures are not necessary at the moment” (ask me later why I am so pissed off at Mexico’s epidemiological strategy against COVID-19). Anyhow…

In this blog post, I want to address some of the limitations of models and modeling, and the risk that we are currently facing of everyone wanting to become “arm-chair epidemiologists” in light of COVID 19. I write this as someone with a double PhD in political science and human geography who has spent years of his life reading, learning and understanding mathematical epidemiology models, and those three degree theses (undergrad in chemical engineering, Masters in economics and PhD) are models of various kinds (2 mathematical, 1 game-theoretic).

I am not an epidemiologist, nor do I have a PhD in epidemiology, and when I mention things like rate of transmission, mortality, etc. I do so establishing clear boundaries on what I think I CAN know. I’ve mentioned before how when I came in contact with mathematical epidemiology.

I started reading up on mathematical epidemiology around the early 2000s (20 years, now), and right after we got hit with several epidemics, including SARS, H1N1, MERS and Ebola. I sought experts on Twitter on this kind of modeling, such as Dr. Maia Majumder and Dr. Sherri Rose.

I understand well enough (thanks to having done mathematical modeling myself) that models, and particularly epidemiological models, rely on assumptions. What makes mathematical epidemiology important, in my view, is the combination of knowing math AND epidemiology. This area is inherently cross- and inter-disciplinary. Mathematical epidemiologists are modelers who understand the epidemiological assumptions and consequences of their models. Many of them, alongside virologists, statisticians, physicians, social workers, medical anthropologists, are losing sleep trying to figure out SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19). Modelers are trying to get the model assumptions right because they know that there’s enormous uncertainty in creating models. We calibrate models with empirical data for this reason, trying to adjust them to reality.

BUT, and here’s the but: reality right now is extraordinarily uncertain, and that’s what is making mathematical epidemiologists (and epidemiologists overall) so concerned. The natural sciences’ component of this epidemics are still developing. We can’t say “this is another flu”. Because there’s so much uncertainty (not only in the models we are using but also on the virology/epidemiology of this pandemics), we need to take precautions that, to some people, may look extreme. People are preaching social distancing and pre-isolation in abundance of caution. This is NOT just another flu and virologists/epidemiologists are trying to figure out why. We need interdisciplinary work where we acknowledge our knowledge limitations, the assumptions we are making, the potential risk pathways that we may need to walk, trade offs we make.

here’s a reason why public understanding of science scholars, communications specialists, risk analysis and disaster management academics are all face-palming right now (myself included). Not everyone is, nor should be an epidemiologist. We need specialists of all areas. We need to develop wiser ways to communicate the risks of COVID and the implications of models we make, and as consumers of this information, we need to accept that models bring along uncertainties, and our activities carry a certain degree of risk. This is all about managing it.

When people say “we are all in this together”, it’s because we are. COVID-19 is revealing why interdisciplinary work matters and our planet is becoming a global laboratory for its implementation. We all, civilians and scientists, have a role and responsibility in surviving this. This is the time to absorb different perspectives on the epidemiology and virology of COVID-19, and the human dimensions of this disease and the potentially negative implications it will have not only on financial markets but also on hospitals and local health systems. It’s vital that we understand what happens within such a complex system.

Models have assumptions and limited predictive power under contexts of high uncertainty. If you need reassurance as this issue develop, follow knowledgeable people and ask about the limitations, assumptions, and implications of a model. Trust me when I say that nobody is more oncerned about getting this right than the natural and social scientists (as well as the people in the humanities and math, communications specialists, science communicators, journalists). But it has to be an inter-, and cross-disciplinary.

Not just models.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 18, 2020

Fieldwork in the Times of COVID-19: Doing Ethnography During a Pandemic

While I have spent close to two decades doing fieldwork in very marginalized communities all over the world, this is the very first time in my entire life that I have been subjected to the challenge of doing fieldwork, particularly the ethnographic kind that I do, within the context of a global pandemia. I joked on Twitter that this would be the title of my next book:

The truth of the matter is: I don’t really have much experience doing fieldwork during a global pandemic. When AH1N1 (the swine flu) hit Mexico (it was actually the epicenter of the global pandemic), I was living in Vancouver, and I didn’t do much fieldwork in Mexico between 2009 and 2010. So, I was relatively spared from the AH1N1. I do remember getting vaccinated, and being worried about my family back in Mexico, but other than that, AH1N1 did not alter my fieldwork in any significant way, from what I can recall. I did bunker down and isolate, but I had already done most of my interviews for projects I had at the time.

The following are some impressions of mine, having done decades of fieldwork within vulnerable communities, and particularly ethnographic work within areas with extreme water and sanitation poverty and insecurity. I do interview-based, ethnographic and field-experimental work. But for the purposes of this thread, I’m going to focus on ethnographic or fieldwork-based research. I am very much interested in pandemics and infectious diseases, but I actually work in environmental politics.

Mazapil - Concepcion del Oro - Salaverna - Fieldwork June 8 2018My interest in pandemics and the modeling of infectious diseases’ transmission comes from my background as a chemical engineer, the fact that all three of my theses (undergraduate in chemical engineering, Masters in economics of technical change and PhD in political science/human geography) are all mathematical (or other type of) models. I gained an interest in mathematical epidemiology since about 20 years ago, so I can certainly tell you that COVID-19 is in my mind for many reasons, not only the health one.

The photo above shows me and colleagues from UAM doing fieldwork in Zacatecas, an area where there’s extraordinary marginalization and poverty. There are mines there and the general population openly manifested during our interviews that they were very hopeful that someone from their families would end up working at the mine. For the work I do, fieldwork is fundamental. This is the main reason why I have been concerned about deploying fieldwork right now, in the midst of a pandemic.

The kind of work I do, especifically the questions I ask, are associated with perceptions of insecurity, and with the social, political and health-related impacts of water and sanitation interventions (or lack thereof). In a pandemic, people facing hardships such as rough sleeping (homelessness) are much, MUCH more vulnerable to highly infectious diseases. People who do not have the dignity of access to a toilet (a human right I have written about and fought for) also face similar hygiene-related challenges that could potentially not only endanger them but also their contexts and environments.

As a highly immunocompromised researcher, I have taken an approach and philosophy towards my fieldwork that is centered in a somewhat balanced way on my subjects and on my own health. I do feel like I owe it to my subjects to study what I do. But at the same time, I also feel as though I owe it to them to be healthy (-ish) enough to conduct fieldwork and have conversations with them and amplify their voices. Navigating field and site-related issues right now for me is tricky. This is the semester I don’t teach, thus, his is also the semester where I do most of my fieldwork. And since I use comparative ethnography, I end up travelling all over the world to different sites.

I obviously cannot do that right now, and I am not going to for the foreseeable future. This is something that has me very concerned. Along a different line of thinking, I want to to discuss how to do ethnography of vulnerable communities. When I do research of vulnerable populations I guide much of what I do by what Professor Liamputtong says in her book, Researching the Vulnerable.

So, what do we do regarding fieldwork in an era of COVID-19?

Rio Manzanares y Parque (Puerta de Toledo, Madrid, España)

A photo of the Manzanares river from when I last did fieldwork in Madrid in early 2016
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Doing fieldwork right now would not only compromise MY health, but also risk compromising MY SUBJECTS’ health. And this would make them in turn even MORE vulnerable.

I have read ethnographies associated with pandemics and infectious diseases, but not exactly OF pandemics. Some work (including Adia Benton’s HIV exceptionalism) and Emily Wanderer’s “The Life of a Pest: An Ethnography of Biological Invasion in Mexico” is interesting to me but not exactly ethnographies conducted WITHIN an epidemic outbreak or infectious disease pandemic context.

Doing fieldwork (and ethnography) in contexts where highly contagious diseases are prevalent brings up questions of ethics: to whom do researchers owe themselves? I have read countless stories of heroes who first discovered infectious diseases or treated them and were killed. Killed by the same diseases they swore to fight. Thus we end up in territory of moral quandaries. Should I die (or risk dying) to expose the challenges facing decimated societies who are afflicted by infectious diseases? What is the value of my risking exposure? Do I do more/less? These are questions that keep making the rounds in my mind and I don’t have answers for them.

To those who are finding being on the field right now and feeling emotionally and mentally challenged and overwhelmed, I think I can say this:

I get it.

I get you.


I hear you and I see you.

I think it’s important to protect oneself AND the populations we study. We are in this together. Take as many precautions as you need, and “abort the mission” if you need to.

No degree or research project is worth, in my view, risking your life.

Posted in academia, qualitative methods, research, research methods.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 17, 2020