Category: Research

We have the great pleasure of announcing, on behalf of the editors and authors, publication of the full and final version of the first DFM e-book to coincide with World Fisheries Day 2023!

The full book is freely available in two downloadable sizes at https://tbtiglobal.net/dried-fish-matters-e-book/.

We would like to express our deep gratitude to TBTI Global and, in particular, Vesna Kereži for her editorial acumen and Ratana Chuenpagdee for having suggested the idea for the book in the first place.

Exploring the Social Economy of Dried Fish

This eclectic edited volume is the outcome of a project with transdisciplinary co-learning ambitions. A first idea for this work emerged from a series of Dried Fish Matters Partnership transdisciplinary roundtables at the MARE “People and the Sea” Conference in 2021. As we shared our experiences of learning about dried fish value chains, we were energized by the discussion of the various incomplete experiments, partial successes, and unanswered questions within our work, all of which signalled vitality in our research-in-progress. But we sensed regret that much of this exciting yet “messy” work of exploring new categories of knowledge, as we were doing with dried fish, might never make its way into print. Indeed, failures tend to be obscured in academic publications – the false starts and dead ends being relegated to a sentence or two in a “methodology” section, thence entering the black boxes of scientific knowledge. In an attempt to capture the excitement of the collaborative learning process, along with the evocative indeterminacy of the work-in-progress, our group agreed to prepare an experimental volume that could highlight the process – rather than the results – of our investigations into dried fish value chains.

Co-authored, co-editored, collaboratively reviewed and transdisciplinary – in many ways this work fits the template of the scholarly edited volume. At the same time, it embraces the unfinished and inconclusive: in our call for contributions, we invited authors to describe preliminary results, reflect on the research process, invite contemplation by readers, present field notes or raw data, or convey the original words and works of research participants or collaborators. It is also a work that, like the partnership from which it arises, aims to navigate the boundary between academic and practising communities. While some chapters are presented in a relatively familiar academic style, others more enthusiastically take up the invitation to work outside the boundaries of scholarly convention. The book includes photo-essays, recipes, stories, conversations, and even reflections by contributing researchers on their own taste for dried fish. Many of these contributions might be viewed as an intermediate stage of scholarship – more refined than fieldnotes, less so than a journal article – or as essays in the original sense of the unfinished, imperfect “attempt” at addressing a subject, akin to the musical or artistic study or étude.

Co-learning

This book was partly conceived as an experiment in co-learning, as suggested to us by the experience of Too Big to Ignore (TBTI). Co-learning is a term used by TBTI as part of the “transdisciplinary (TD) co-production” framework, defined by Polk (2015) as a form of problem-based learning that includes both practitioners and researchers throughout the knowledge generation process.

This book is the product of several interconnected co-learning processes, including an overarching effort to demystify the learning process at work in our own project on dried fish. The SSHRC Partnership Grants scheme, which has funded this work, is intended to foster mutual co-operation, sharing of intellectual leadership, and the formalization of partnerships in which collaborative learning can occur across different institutions. 

Twenty-six of the individual chapters in this volume are multi-authored, while the remaining chapters also reflect co-learning processes – as attempts to synthesize groups of chapters, analyze information prepared by project research teams, or suggest novel research approaches in conversation with other authors.

The collective editorial work that followed each set of manuscript submissions has also provided an important space for co-learning. The first thing that some of us learned was how much people really like dried fish in South and South-East Asia. Although most of us grew up in countries where dried fish was a common part of the diet, we found that dried fish is of broader importance than we had assumed, and by interacting with the authors of different chapters we were able to encourage different themes to arise. 

Playful writing

We hope that the e-book format, embraced as a polyvocal work that avoids the “gatekeeping” of scholarly apparatus, has allowed new voices to be heard – including those of students, practitioners, and researchers from the Global South, but also those who make a living from dried fish. The section “Food, life, and stories” includes stories from dried fish processors and vendors, an artist and a poet, and recipes shared from the families of researchers themselves. As Ratana Chuenpagdee (one of our editors) commented, this project has demonstrated that research can be playful, creative, and fun. It has provided an opportunity for people to provide their own ideas about why dried fish matters, and to talk about it in their own ways. We did not anticipate when DFM started that the passion expressed by so many consumers for the taste of dried fish would be mirrored in the enthusiasm for the topic by participants in the project. 

Making sense of Dried Fish

The book was not originally planned in the design of the Dried Fish Matters project, but as an emergent initiative it succeeded at catalyzing genuine partnership in ways that surpassed our expectations. It also created a space for academic researchers, at the core of our network, to reinforce community connections. All chapters in this book were peer-reviewed by editors and other colleagues, yet we deliberately framed this process as one of knowledge sharing – and co-learning – rather than evaluation of merit. As we encouraged the inclusion of “raw” field notes, stories, transcripts, and images, the finished work presents a collection of disparate pieces, a great number of which draw on visual forms of representation, which we have assembled into the three main themes of “food, life, and stories”, “describing dried fish value chains”, and “co-learning”.

While our brief synthesis chapters draw attention to the interconnections between the pieces in each of these sections, we hope this book will inspire readers to reflect on how our stories, recipes, essays, and photographs about dried fish fit together in other ways, encouraging us all to think further about the value and challenges present in dried fish value chains – and why, fundamentally, dried fish matters.