Last updated on May 24, 2015
I’m an academic, which means that my summers are characterized by high expectations and low productivity.
Every spring, I make a list of all the research projects I want to work on during the summer. Inevitably, by the time September comes around, I have accomplished about half of what I had set out to do.
So it goes. Which is not to say that my summer was completely unproductive. Here is a list of things that I did spend time on this summer, in no particular order:
- I worked on a paper on farmers markets with my colleague Rob King, which I am very excited about and which will make its seminar debut in less than two weeks.
- I began designing a series of lab experiments aimed at studying individual behavior in the face of risk of a certain kind with one of my PhD students. We are hoping to run those experiments in late fall and early spring.
- I flew to Montreal for a very quick visit and spent some quality time with family and friends.
- This year’s annual meetings of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) were held in Minneapolis. I made three presentations during the meetings: one on a new paper on smallholder adaptation to climate change in Ethiopia I am working on with former colleagues; one on my paper with Nick Carnes about why members of Congress vote for the farm bill; and one on how to publish in academic journals. I also picked up my Quality of Research Discovery award, and saw my colleague and coauthor Rob King receive the AAEA’s highest distinction.
- I spent two weeks in Peru to lunch a new research project funded by the International Trade Center on the economics of quinoa with my Towson University colleague Seth Gitter. Generally speaking, after 10 years of working mostly in and on Africa, I felt like it was time to work elsewhere and I want to pivot my research agenda away from Africa, toward Latin America. This is the first step in that direction. It’ll be nice to get to the countries I am working on in less than 24 hours, for a change, and to remain roughly in the same time zone. You know how some academics working in Africa fall in love with it? That never quite happened to me. But it did happen with Peru, and I can’t wait to go back. Seth and I also managed to visit Machu Picchu, which would be great if it weren’t for the 3000 visitors the place receives every day, whose presence (and behavior) ruins the sacredness of the site. This research project will be fun.
- Finally, I co-taught a three-day summer course on the political economy of food with my colleague Wendy Rahn, over in political science. This was an executive education-like course geared toward graduate students in disciplines other than applied economics and political science, with most of them in the hard sciences.
Blog Fatigue
This summer I also tried to recover from the blog fatigue I had been experiencing since the spring. That is, I deliberately tried to take a break from blogging, because I was getting tired of it.
First and foremost, now that I am in a department where my colleagues actually value my contribution to research, teaching, and service, there are many, many more demands on my time, which leaves little time for blogging. Indeed, I started blogging in 2011 so that I could “control the frame,” i.e., so that I could define what my research agenda meant instead of letting others define it for me. And that worked, which was great, but it also meant that I had to rethink why I was blogging, and I didn’t have time to do that until this summer.
Second, one does get tired of saying the same things on the same exact topics, but in different words. I can only blog so many times about how there is no link between GMOs and human health, or about how the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity does not constitute a proof that smallholders can feed the world. So I spent the summer accumulating ideas for longer, more analytical posts, as I suspect few of you come here to read posts of the “Hey check out this cool NBER working paper!” variety.
“There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand…”
Yet I don’t want to stop blogging, both because the platform has allowed me to interact with and meet many interesting people in my profession and outside of it and because the act of blogging helps me clarify my thoughts about my research area and makes me a more effective (if not more productive) researcher.
So my resolution for the new academic year is to blog less frequently, but to write longer posts. I was reminded that I shouldn’t stop blogging just yet when when a number of people ask how it was that I came to do fieldwork on the economics of quinoa in Peru, and I have to explain to them that some blog post I wrote once caught the attention of someone with the financial means to make such a research project happen.