Understanding and solving intractable resource governance problems.
Three of my PhD students are close to finishing their doctoral dissertations over the course of the next few months, and I’ve begun accepting new thesis advisees, so obviously I’ve again been thinking, obsessively, about crafting research questions, finding a gap in the literature, making the contribution our research makes quite clear, etc. I’ve written […]
– June 28, 2025
“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” ― Annie Proulx In my courses, on my blog, across all my social media platforms, and everywhere I go, I […]
– April 13, 2025
I am currently mentoring a few academics (my own PhD students and a few early-career TT scholars) and I am trying to teach them about how to frame their work in terms of the broader questions of a field, and a discipline. The kind of exercise I am executing, trying to teach how to connect […]
– November 15, 2024
One of the things I resented the most was not getting the guidance I required for a lot of the work that came with the PhD degree. There are things, of course, where I did get advice, and one of them was to write my doctoral dissertation as a package of three papers focusing on […]
– April 23, 2022
THREAD: on making your claim of novelty and contribution to the literature VERY clear with an example from Dr. Lisa Pinley Covert’s book. This blog post will be of interest to book writers, article and book chapter writers and thesis writers. Note how Pinley Covert makes her research question clear. Pinley Covert establishes that this […]
– April 29, 2021
I clearly remember my first semester. I was absolutely dedicated to studying. Like, beyond whatever I ever had done before. I arrived on campus at 7:30 in the morning and left at 9:30 at night. I don’t want anybody to think that this was healthy. It was just that I was… really convinced that this […]
– September 21, 2019
I did my PhD in Canada, where doctoral dissertation defenses are public, so what I’m going to narrate here is how I prepared for my own defense under the rules and standards of the school where I graduated from (The University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada). I won’t cover other systems as I don’t […]
– March 13, 2019
I have three PhD students right in their second year, plus I informally mentor other 3. I love mentoring and supervising students, particularly doctoral ones, because this component of being a professor is really the one that allows you to build how other scholars think and you can see them flourish. All doctoral students I […]
– November 22, 2018
I recently participated in a doctoral candidacy exam recently (a student who asked me to sit on her committee, but whom I’m not directly supervising), abd my participation prompted me to reconsider what and how I teach my doctoral students. I reflect on this issue frequently because I am really trying to improve how I […]
– June 28, 2018
Last year, my first Mexican PhD student graduated from our PhD programme in Public Policies. While I had graduated PhD students at other universities, Rafa was my first Mexican doctoral student and therefore, I was (and obviously continue to be) very invested in his success. I spent a week working with him and preparing him […]
– January 27, 2018
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