Developing and Sustaining Your Academic Writing Practice

From graduate students, postdoctoral fellows to senior faculty members, the writing process remains one of the most challenging elements of academic life. Yet it is our writing that is published, disseminated and eventually cited. We are asked to produce text in a systematic way, frequently juggling other responsibilities and struggling to carve out enough time to write. 

Developing and sustaining a writing practice requires a set of systematic strategies that can carry us through the process of completing articles, book manuscripts, book chapters and conference papers. 

In this interactive, 3-hour workshop (with strategic breaks and multiple exercises built into the workflow), I will walk graduate students and postdoctoral fellows through several of my most trusted and used strategies to build confidence in your writing, craft different types of written research outputs, and manage the writing project pipeline. 

This workshop has five objectives: 

1. Help you gain a deeper understanding of the academic writing process and the multiple intricacies and challenges. 
2. Teach you an array of techniques that you can use to overcome writer’s block, a challenge that we academic writers face daily, 
3. Assist you in developing a series of tactics that you can use to sustain your writing even in the face of multiple demands on your time,
4. Aid you in establishing a strategy to manage a pipeline of multiple writing projects, and
5. Share with you a few techniques to diversify your writing portfolio, including tips on how to tackle your dissertation, journal articles and book chapters, conference papers and grant proposals. 

Facilitator

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega is an Associate Professor in the Methods Lab of the Latin American Faculty for Social Sciences (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO) Sede Mexico. He is a specialist in comparative public policy and focuses on North American environmental politics, primarily sanitation and water governance, solid waste management, neoinstitutional theory, transnational environmental social movements, and experimental methods in public policy. Dr. Pacheco-Vega’s current research focuses on the spatial, political, and human dimensions of public service delivery from a comparative perspective. 
He has been Editor for the Americas of the International Journal of Qualitative Methods and is Associate Editor of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (JESS), Assistant Editor for Policy Design and Practice. He also sits on the editorial board of Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Water International, Global Environmental Politics, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, Administrative Theory & Praxis, Regions and Cohesion, International Studies Review, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, and Politics, Groups & Identities. He sat on the Executive Committee of the Environmental Studies Section of ISA in 2013-2015, and chaired the ESS Sprout Committee in 2016. He is a member of the Mexican National Researchers’ System (SNI), and holds the distinction of National Researcher Level 1.