{"id":10318,"date":"2014-09-03T05:00:06","date_gmt":"2014-09-03T09:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=10318"},"modified":"2015-05-24T11:15:28","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T15:15:28","slug":"summer-wrap-up-and-blog-fatigue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/10318","title":{"rendered":"Summer Wrap-Up (and Blog Fatigue)"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_10332\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-10332\" style=\"width: 940px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/MachuPicchu.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-10332 size-large\" src=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/MachuPicchu-940x705.jpg\" alt=\"MachuPicchu\" width=\"940\" height=\"705\" srcset=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/MachuPicchu-940x705.jpg 940w, https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/MachuPicchu-580x435.jpg 580w, https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/MachuPicchu.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 940px) 100vw, 940px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-10332\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Machu Picchu (Photo: Marc F. Bellemare).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I&#8217;m an academic, which means that my summers are characterized by high expectations and low productivity.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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:<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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\u00a0less than two weeks.<\/li>\n<li>I began designing\u00a0a 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.<\/li>\n<li>I flew to\u00a0Montreal for a very quick visit and spent some quality time with family and friends.<\/li>\n<li>This year&#8217;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 <a title=\"Slides for &quot;Why Do Members of Congress Support Agricultural Protection?&quot;\" href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/2014\/08\/slides-for-why-do-members-of-congress-support-agricultural-protection\/\" target=\"_blank\">why members of Congress vote for the farm bill<\/a>; and one on <a title=\"Contributing to Public Goods: How to Publish in Academic Journals\" href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/2014\/08\/contributing-to-public-goods-how-to-publish-in-academic-journals\/\" target=\"_blank\">how to publish in academic journals<\/a>. I also picked up my <a title=\"AAEA Quality of Research Discovery Award for Bellemare, Barrett, and Just (2013)\" href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/2014\/07\/aaea-quality-of-research-discovery-award-for-bellemare-barrett-and-just-2013\/\" target=\"_blank\">Quality of Research Discovery award<\/a>, and saw my colleague and coauthor Rob King\u00a0receive <a title=\"AAEA Fellows\" href=\"http:\/\/www.aaea.org\/about-aaea\/awards-and-honors\/aaea-fellows\/previous-aaea-fellows\" target=\"_blank\">the AAEA&#8217;s highest distinction<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I spent two weeks in Peru to lunch a new research project funded by the <a title=\"ITC\" href=\"http:\/\/www.intracen.org\" target=\"_blank\">International Trade Center<\/a> on the economics of quinoa with my Towson University colleague <a title=\"Seth Gitter\" href=\"http:\/\/pages.towson.edu\/sgitter\/\" target=\"_blank\">Seth Gitter<\/a>. 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\u00a0pivot my research agenda away from Africa, toward Latin America. This is the first step in that direction. It&#8217;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.\u00a0But it did happen with Peru, and I can&#8217;t wait to go back. Seth and I also managed to visit Machu Picchu, which would be great if it weren&#8217;t for the 3000 visitors the place receives every day, whose presence (and <a href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/SelfieStick.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">behavior<\/a>) ruins the sacredness of the site. This research project will be fun.<\/li>\n<li>Finally, I co-taught a three-day summer course on the political economy of food\u00a0with my colleague <a title=\"Wendy Rahn\" href=\"http:\/\/www.polisci.umn.edu\/people\/profile.php?UID=rahnx003\" target=\"_blank\">Wendy Rahn<\/a>, 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Blog Fatigue<\/h3>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>First and foremost, now that I am in a department where my colleagues actually value\u00a0my 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 &#8220;control the frame,&#8221; i.e., so that <em>I<\/em> could define what my research agenda meant instead of letting others define it for me. And that <a title=\"Onward and Upward!\" href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/2013\/02\/fi-al-haraka-baraka\/\" target=\"_blank\">worked<\/a>, which was great,\u00a0but it also meant that\u00a0I had to rethink <em>why<\/em> I was blogging, and I didn&#8217;t have time to do that until this summer.<\/p>\n<p>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\u00a0to read posts of the &#8220;Hey check out this cool NBER working paper!&#8221; variety.<\/p>\n<h3>&#8220;There&#8217;s Always Money in the Banana Stand&#8230;&#8221;<\/h3>\n<!--YouTube Error: bad URL entered-->\n<p>Yet I don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>So my resolution for the new academic year is to blog less frequently, but to write longer posts. I was\u00a0reminded that I shouldn&#8217;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\u00a0them that <a title=\"Quinoa Nonsense, or Why the World Still Needs Agricultural Economists\" href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/2013\/01\/quinoa-nonsense-or-why-the-world-still-needs-agricultural-economists\/\" target=\"_blank\">some blog post I wrote once<\/a>\u00a0caught the attention of someone with the financial means to make such a research project happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;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<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/10318\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Summer Wrap-Up (and Blog Fatigue)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-2Gq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10318"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10338,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10318\/revisions\/10338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}