This past quarter we marked the beginning of the Dried Fish Matters (DFM) Scoping Research phase, with a four-day workshop in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh held from February 20 to 25.
Attended by leaders of the DFM country and sub-country research teams, the workshop succeeded in its goals of creating synergies and building shared research approaches across our research teams in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Thailand.
The workshop consisted of 2.5 days of meetings around a full field research day on day 2. The field day turned out to be a pivotal moment during the workshop. It provided an opportunity for researchers to test the preliminary interview guides in groups mixed by discipline and geographical origin. It was a valuable team building exercise and generally validated the design of our interview guides.
Discussions focused on fundamental questions about the objectives of the project, the degree of flexibility within the research design, and conceptual questions about terminology and theoretical inspiration.
Key outcomes were agreement on the following points:
- In a project with such diverse participants and with an awareness of the diversity that exists in the social economy of dried fish across the region, there is an ongoing need to internalize a concern for the politics of knowledge. Transdisciplinarity is one possible guide to this challenge.
- The need to balance coordination across the project with openness to diverse disciplines and approaches could be met by increasing the number of face-to-face meetings, more conceptual collaboration, sharing methodological innovations and coding strategies, and strengthening the full array of project governance mechanisms laid out in the original project proposal.
- The overarching conceptual reference point for the project should be seen as social economy, not value chains.
- The project’s ‘mapping’ objective should be seen as an aspiration to multi-dimensional visualization, not a two-dimensional map.
- The field day showed the methodological value of pre-scoping field visits to hone the research instruments and build familiarity with the method.
- The project’s definition of dried fish deserves publicizing further.
- Trash fish, or dried fish for fish meal, are an important area of attention for the project as it has ecological and economic implications for our focus on dried fish for human consumption.
