4WSFC roundtables proposal

This is the DFM proposal for the 4WSFC Asia-Pacific. The title of the session is "Collaborative process in research on dried fish in Asia: social economy, nutrition, and ‘improvement’".

Session overview

This session reports on progress towards understanding the social economy of dried fish in South and Southeast Asia under the umbrella of the Dried Fish Matters project. Rather than a traditional paper presentation format, the session is organized around a series of thematic mini-workshops on themes of transdisciplinary collaboration, social economy, nutrition, and ‘improvement’. The first theme, collaboration, is embedded in the very design of the panel itself.  The three other themes are the focus of each mini-workshop. These begin with short presentations of key observations and emerging questions, articulated in relation to visual material, that open up into a plenary brainstorming session on each theme.

The panel is designed to reflect the work-in-progress stage of the DFM project. It takes inspiration from the idea that out of uncertainty and contingency, valuable new insights and suggestions for new directions may emerge.

DFM is broadly about social justice in dried fish economies but we have not selected that as a point of focus in this proposal as our primary attention is on research innovation as a process, and on food, gender, and governance in terms of content.

Session structure and guiding questions

• Introduction: Collaborative knowledge co-construction around dried fish
• Mini-workshop 1: Mapping dried fish social economies
  • Guiding question: what are DFM’s key comparative findings about dried fish social economies in Asia and about the mapping of ‘knowledge’ as an emergent practice?
• Mini-workshop 2: Dried fish as food
  • Guiding question: what do we learn about the nutrition that dried fish affords from a social economy perspective?
• Mini-workshop 3: Examining ‘improvement’ in dried fish social economies
  • Guiding question: how can we best mobilize research on dried fish to further the wellbeing of small-scale dried fish value chain actors and dried fish consumers?
• Cross-cutting discussion and conclusion
  • Guiding question: what are the key emerging lessons for collaborative research practice from the DFM project?

Format

The session includes presentations and discussion, but is organized in a collaborative knowledge-building workshop format as described in the session synopsis. In order to be inclusive of DFM project team members, we hope to include participation of the larger team using Zoom or some other online platform. Should Covid make in-person participation impossible, we are ready to participate fully remotely.