I started this site and this blog almost two years ago, while conducting preliminary research in Mexico City. The site started out with the briefest of intros, and a “coming soon” research section, and a short post about the importance of on-the-ground research (which was also an expression of how good it felt to finally be on the ground). I slipped a link into my Twitter bio, and that was it. Site launched.

That summer in Mexico was my first return to the country since I had left Guadalajara to move to New York five years earlier. I had passed my comprehensive exams, and had the bones of a dissertation project. Creating a site was my way of telling myself that it was time to be a serious academic: to have a research agenda and a long CV, and to feel comfortable talking about and sharing these. But why the blog?

It took me a while to realize this, but the main point of this blog to capture the processes that won’t show up among the static products on the other pages of this site, or the lines of a CV. Starting my field research in 2017, I knew it would take years (at best) to have any finished, published products to show for all my work. Blogging is a very small way to document my research processes, and also to remind myself that there is far more to writing than just polished, academic pieces.

Documenting my research processes is an important step towards transparency. Researchers do this through codebooks and similar anyway, but I wanted another record of my research, one that can stretch further back and think about why I research the topics that I do (as opposed to just recording how I research them). Conventional political science writing strips away any sense of narrative or discovery to the research process; the results are announced at the beginning of the paper, and then presented as the quite inevitable outcome of theory + data + methods. Research results can be surprising with respect to existing theory, but never with respect to research design. Blogging gives me a way of capturing the constant surprise of discovery, and of narrating all of the messy work that gets left out of more formal academic writing.

This blog is also a way to remind myself to write regularly and imperfectly. Perhaps to think imperfectly too; to work through and reflect on the nagging ideas for which I have no clear answers, but which seem too important to leave completely alone. As students we receive plenty of encouragement to write, but also plenty of pressure to produce those final, polished products. As though such products can be downloaded directly from some genius repository in our brains. This blog is my space to muddle through ideas, and to ramble on through paragraphs. And controversially, it is a place from which the passive voice is not necessarily banished.

So after two years, welcome. Among these blog posts you will find anticipations of and reflections on teaching; updates on my progress delving into data; thinkings-through of some of the big theories and conventions in the topics I study; and the occasional reminder of how ludicrously wrong things can go. Thanks for making it through at least one of my posts, and stay tuned for a steady trickle of further ramblings.