WG1 meeting 2021-07-14

Meting topic	Conference debrief and planning session
Recording	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWTOLHOvBtw
Date	2021-07-14

Agenda

1. Publications and other outputs building on the MARE Conference roundtables. Options include one or more ebooks, an edited volume, a journal special issue, and online/multimedia presentations.
2. IMBeR session, "Dried Small Fish: Ecology, Value Chains, and Nutrition". This will be a 90-minute virtual session at the upcoming IMBeR workshop, November 22-25, in the early stages of planning.
3. Planning for transition to Phase 2 of the DFM project. Currently plans are being made for in-depth research components to be led by graduate students in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. We will also need to consider the role of geographic Research Teams and the Working Groups in building studies that address the themes and questions arising from the Scoping research.

Reflections on the MARE Conference

GAYATHRI: Regarding the findings, presented in the final roundtable: the themes of gender and labour came across quite strongly in more than one presentation. These could be brought out in published outputs.

RATANA: Wondering if we have stats on who participated in the sessions? How many people from outside DFM actually attended each one? Even though we met a lot and talked about our work, it was nice to have a "professional" presentation, not just an internal discussion. There was good discussion; Ben did a good job of pulling everything together at the end.

Can we extract some of the videos, curate them, and use for our own consumption? If people followed us through the three roundtables, that is an indication of interest in DFM. It will be good to see good follow-up.

I loved the video! It is nice to see that a project such as this one does not simply deliver science, but also humanities. A lot of social science researchers don't really "get" humanities, so it would be good to bring more of that into our work, since there is a lot of it in dried fish.

DEREK: Would like to acknowledge Jenia's impetus for the inclusion of a humanities perspective.

NIREKA: In terms of audience, 30+ was at the higher end for the conference as a whole, even though many of the audience members were from the project itself; it would be good to see who participated across the three sessions. The third roundtable timing was off, so we lost our discussion. I would also endorse gender and labour themes for follow-up, but also looking at the rich material on how markets work. So more work on visualization, and the artistic and human angle.

TARA: The preparation that went into the presentations was an important opportunity to collaborte. The visualization exercise was absolutely rejuvenating. It was a challenge to present it in an intelligible way, though this helped with learning. I wished it were a physical conference, so you could dedicate yourself full-time to attending the events without competing obligations. For the first time, we saw the diversity in the project. Also, I was shocked to see all that remains to be done! It is both inspiring and challenging. Thanks to the efforts from the project team in helping put this together.

DEREK: A return thanks to the participants and presenters, who stayed within the themes of the DFM project and contributed in a timely way. I also got a sense of the weight and growing depth of this project. I agree on the inadequacy of the online format; I too only participated in our own sessions.

BEN: It's fascinating to see all the comparison and synthesis that is starting to emerge. The visualization was a surprise, and really moving -- I completely forgot to take notes! A methodological theme that comes out is that all these different approaches to value chains as a concept, and taking it in new directions, gives an opportunity to do something more (conceptually).

DEREK: The visualization is especially powerful. We should work further to support visual data, methods, and outputs. We might want to think about photovoice or similar methodological approaches to engaging participants through visual media.

DEREK: The next question is to think about outputs for the next stage of the project. Ratana proposed an ebook.

RATANA: This came up in discussion with Sayeed, drawing on the questions developed by WG1. We used the term "transdisciplinarity" in the project proposal itself, and this has clearly been present in the project from its inception, through the Cox's Bazar workshop. So the "transdisciplinary journey" is a reference point. To be able to capture this as a process or pathway, not final product, addressing the surprises we found along the way -- topics and questions that unexpectedly caught our attention -- we could bring these ideas together in an ebook. TBTI has an ebook series: these are non-peer-reviewed, open access PDFs on the website, that can have stories, essays, reports, or anything, short or long. They are lightly edited and widely disseminated. They can also be considered pre-publication drafts (working papers), but mainly as a space for exploratory investigation. We co-created the proposal, co-designed the methodology, and now we can co-write the outputs. In each team we have people from different disciplines, and collaborators, who can support this work.

DEREK: Are there concrete examples from TBTI?

RATANA: The Small-Scale Fisheries in Japan volume (Yinji Li and Tamano Namikawa) includes contributions from cooperatives, pictures, material on the Japanese character... This is the least academically oriented book in our series.

DEREK: This is a good "bridge" opportunity that is not necessarily rigorous, but can help us work toward academic outputs.

RATANA: Also, we don't want to lose the richness of our thought process and our learning. Those elements are not necessarily included in a scientific paper. But they are important, and should be shared! The struggles that we face, the emotional response we feel when we see how women are treated in certain places, how our understanding of concepts grows, for example. It should be something that people want to read: people don't like reading policy briefs, but they do like reading the Japan book, which was given an award by the Prefecture!

DEREK: What do people think of this proposal? This should ideally be something that isn't burdensome.

NIREKA: Most of the time we have been working in country teams. With the visualization work, we got together. If we could do a bit more comparative work across the countries, that would be helpful. Just thinking through ideas -- having discussions across at least two or three country teams where there are common themes, or like-minded people.

DEREK: We could have an interweaving of focused and comparative material.

RATANA: We should view this as free-flowing in terms of format, and non-mandatory for contributions. The idea of exchange is good. Comparative analysis is a strength of the project, though we can view this as a step towards that, which could be a much bigger output. It should not take much more than a couple of hours each!

NIREKA: The example of the visualization exercise was helpful too. We had a conversation on smell and taste in the group, then Eric pulled out clips from our discussion for inclusion in the video.

ERIC: That was a fun exercise. We found that there was a lot of knowledge about the smell and taste of dried fish already within our team, which we had not made explicit to that point. There were also, perhaps, assumptions about the nature of dried fish that came from everyone's own personal experience, even though our experiences with dried fish are actually quite diverse. In this instance we had an unstructured conversation over Zoom about how we can describe the smell and taste of dried fish (recording each person's audio separately), then I took some short excerpts from that conversation and added them to the video, superimposing photographs shared by our group members.

TARA: There are other materials that we could include -- we have a collaborator in Jaffrabad, a local writer, whose writings could be included.

JENIA: Indeed, this could be a space for including the work of other contributors whose work might not fit in academic outputs. For example, we have paintings from a collaborator in the Sundarabans that we could include and interpret; this gives more agency to others.

DEREK: Dialogue with collaborators is a helpful idea.

TASLIMA: Academic writing is very dry. When we bring our content to more ordinary people, it becomes quite interesting, so I am in favour of this idea. We have a collaborator in Sylhet who is a writer and singer, and has short writings in Bangla on his Facebook page that discuss dried fish -- we could try to include those as well!

DEREK: We could link to media files as well.

MAHFUZ: This will be a good opportunity for me as a student, to bring together both anthropological references and examples from other countries in the project.

DEREK: So your contribution would be a kind of "archaeology" of writing on dried fish.

RAKTIMA: SES and Resilience frameworks to develop conceptualisations of immanent, localised, organisational social, political and production relations. Engaging caste, class, kinship issues to understand social construction and local political processes - just a thought.

DEREK: Yes, and the idea of emergence as key from SES

JENIA: This TBTI ebook can set an example of the multi-modal formats through which research and activism can be disseminated.

DEREK: That could be a framing idea for the ebook. The project needs to be steered. We need some people who take responsibility for leading the process. For example, in order to have comparative thematic pieces throughout the book, we need people who have a sense of the whole to identify those themes and steer things. Could Ratana handle this?

RATANA: This is exciting. We should extend the invitation, with Eric, to invite volunteers -- particularly invite early-career researchers -- begin with a call for contributions / invitation to join the coordinating team. There is nothing wrong with having many people helping to coordinate.

SAYEED: Peer review within the group before the formal review would be great!

Volunteers for ebook

• Madu
• Taslima
• Aklima
• Mahfuz
• Raktima

IMBeR

NIREKA: IMBeR (Integrated Marine Biosphere Research) is planning a workshop on a variety of themes; one session will be on dried small fish, which should be multidisciplinary and multi-geographic, combining South, South-East and East Asia presentations on ecology, value chains and nutrition related to dried small fish. DFM has been invited to be a kind of sponsor for this event. We can do most of the South and South-East Asia presentations from within the group, and also bring out the work on the global literature review that has been done within the project. We will also have guest contributors from East Asia. We will also want to find people who are working on the ecology of Indian Ocean sardines, sardinella, etc.

We were thinking of three papers for each of the regions; these will need to be synthesis presentations, rather than independent country-level contributions, that include information on all the themes (ecology and nutrition) -- or we could present a synthesis based on the literature review and then case studies addressing one of the specific themes.

DEREK: This panel could be a mechanism to strengthen collaboration and synthesis work across the teams in the project. Over the coming weeks we will continue planning, and perhaps hold a strategy meeting in August.

Discussion of next steps

DEREK: We need to start thinking about next steps now, but we can defer actual intensive work on planning for a bit longer (another two months). Some of the research teams are not very far along in getting their Scoping outputs ready. We want to think about how to convert the Scoping reports into formal academic outputs.

JENIA: The panel on which I was a discussant was eye-opening. There were some questions, e.g., Amalendu asked Sisir about the contribution of SES to value chains, and whether this framing could replace the concept of "value chains". If we are thinking about multi-authored journal articles or other academic outputs, we should have a major focus on the methodological aspects.

DEREK: An outstanding question is how to organize these questions -- Working Group meetings, pages on the wiki...

JENIA: Even though we are using the same theoretical concepts, our research sites are empirically very diverse. So a case study approach can also highlight the specific stories from each site and how they connect to theory.

RATANA: It might be helpful for the teams to know what we are aiming for. For example, if we had in mind a journal special issue with individual country-level case studies drawing on the Scoping reports, along with a couple of methodological and synthesis articles. Having these as goals to work towards would be a great motivation. A comparative analysis could come out of that, as a separate output. We also shouldn't discount the idea of a scholarly book, like the MARE Springer series.

BEN: An ebook is a good way to get these emergent ideas out quickly and keep the momentum. IMBeR gives an opportunity for early synthesis. If it's only presentations (no papers) it could be fairly straightforward; we can think about how to draw out lessons from across the different teams. For a special issue, we have potential for a collection on theory & methods and empirical case studies -- so possibly two special issues or a special issue plus a book.

DEREK: I like the idea of "key comparative lessons" as something to bring out later.

Transition to Stage 2

DEREK: We have questions about how the teams will work in stage 2. In Myanmar, due to political changes we have reallocated funds for the Scoping research in support of students. We have recruited 4 Master's students to work with Kyoko at AIT, who will conduct field research in Myanmar under the guidance of Wae Win, particularly on themes of migration, value chains, gender, and rights.

On project management: I don't have time to get through all the Scoping reports and provide feedback to the teams. It would be useful to have an internal process of peer reviewing of these reports. This may be a good model for the formal academic publications, where there is an internal peer review.

ACTION

EVERYONE: Submit PowerPoints/PDFs of MARE presentations

ERIC and NIREKA: Report back after next week on visualization

ERIC: Get permission to use videos and share with the DFM team members

ERIC: Find the participants list and see who was there beyond the project.

RATANA and ERIC: Send out call for expressions of interest / organize a meeting for the ebook coordination

DEREK and NIREKA: Put together a plan for the IMBeR panel; organize a meeting in August among potential contributors.

DEREK: Send out project reports for peer review.