Understanding and solving intractable resource governance problems.
We’ve probably all heard about the idea of an “elevator pitch” to summarize an idea or a project. One of the challenges I face on a regular basis, with my own thesis students and with those I teach (particularly because I teach research methods, research design, and the mechanics of conducting research) is helping them […]
– August 14, 2020
The more theses I supervise, the more essays I read and the more papers I have to peer-review for publication, the more I realize how important it is to teach how to craft good research questions. Many students of mine come with a general idea of what they want to study for their thesis, but […]
– March 4, 2020
As I mentioned in one of my recent blog posts, I have PhD students at all stages (about to defend their PhD proposal, about to go on to the field, about to finish) and therefore I have been reading a lot of books on the PhD journey. I’ve also been participating in several events associated […]
– June 27, 2018
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
A lot of people ask me about my actual writing process, so I figured I should share some of my practices, and make them into blog posts. I’m lucky that, as I write this blog post, I have a full day available to write (no meetings). The first element of my writing practice is the […]
– July 16, 2024
Dr. Jessica A. J. Rich is an incredible researcher, scholar, and writer. Her book, “State-Sponsored Activism: Bureaucrats and Social Movements in Brazil” is a textbook model for how to write a book in so many ways. I also study social movements in Latin America, so it was important for me to read her book and […]
– February 27, 2024
I like solving and putting together puzzles. Photo credit: Olga Berrios on Flickr. Photo license: CC-BY 2.0 I like assembling evidence and theories to think about the problem, which can also be a metaphor for a puzzle (or as my dear friend Amber Wutich said, a jigsaw). I actually don’t like the type of physical […]
– August 27, 2022
I wrote a thread in Spanish last night on puzzles and how to craft research questions. I’ve written about this topic several times in English, and in Spanish, but not on the actual topic of “puzzles”. This blog post is NOT about “puzzles” (I am preparing another one, in English, on this very topic). But […]
– 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
A lot of people use my blog posts as guides to literature reviews, either for themselves or for their students. A lot of people use my blog posts as guides to literature reviews, either for themselves or for their students. Questions like the ones posed in the quoted tweet are quite common. A few people […]
– March 22, 2021
Recently, Dr. Gretchen Sneegas (Texas A&M University) asked me how I manage multiple writing projects, a situation she’s facing right now as a post-doctoral researcher. This is not uncommon, even as a doctoral students: in academia, we tend to work on several projects at the same time. The biggest challenge for me is how to […]
– September 13, 2020
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 […]
– April 6, 2020
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 wrote a traditional, book-style PhD dissertation, mostly because I actually knew nothing about the three-papers model, and when my advisor saw how far ahead I already was, he decided to just keep my thesis as a book. In hindsight, I wish I could have reformatted it as a three-papers thesis and publish it in […]
– September 13, 2019
Anybody who has ever read my work knows that I’ve done a lot of research using qualitative methods (even though I consider myself a multi-method scholar). Anyhow, Dr. Yasemin Besen-Cassino requested suggestions of “cool journal articles/book chapters” that her qualitative research methods students’ might be interested in reading. Since we have a new Masters in […]
– September 4, 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
While I do multi-methods research, and I wrote three theses using quantitative methods, I have found that many of the research questions I explore are best answered with qualitative methodologies. I don’t know what it is, but every few months, I need to reassert the importance of methods where qualitative data is analyzed. But recently, […]
– September 10, 2018
I am editor for the Americas of a major qualitative methods journal (International Journal of Qualitative Methods), I am a self-identified ethnographer, and I teach courses on the topic. Therefore, knowing good books that I can recommend to my students is very important to me. Dr. Layna Mosley (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) assembled […]
– September 7, 2018
I had known of the excellent work of Dr. Leanne C. Powner for a very long time. We are both political scientists, and since I write so much about academic writing, and I have taught research methods, it was just a matter of time until I got to read Leanne’s excellent book, published by Sage […]
– August 24, 2018
When I was in graduate school, I took several courses with Professor Anthony (Tony) Dorcey, Professor Emeritus with the School of Community and Regional Planning at The University of British Columbia. Perhaps unbeknownst to everyone but only those closest to me, my first interest was in water planning and governance using multistakeholder processes. Professor Dorcey […]
– August 9, 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
I enjoy writing my blog because I can then use my blog posts to teach my own students and research assistants every technique I need them to know. As I said on Twitter the other day, my writings on this blog are a shared knowledge base. I just opened the knowledge base to everyone in […]
– April 21, 2018
There is some advice that is useful for both undergraduate and graduate students, but I find that these posts fit more the needs of Masters’ and Doctoral candidates. Obviously, if you’re looking for advice on Academic Writing, Literature Reviews, Reading Strategies, Organization and Time Management, all of these can be found in their own sub-pages. […]
– July 21, 2017
As I was leaving my office to head to the airport to fly to Mexico City for a workshop on conflicts in extractive industries, I saw the completed printout of Rafael’s dissertation sitting on my desk. Rafael is my soon-to-graduate PhD student. I felt an extreme amount of pride, while also realizing what an enormous […]
– July 15, 2017
The first question I posed in the title of my blog post is one that all of my students (undergraduate and graduate) and most of my research assistants ask me: how do I know when I’ve read enough for a literature review? The answer is never clear cut, unfortunately. I am someone who loves reading, […]
– June 17, 2017
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