WG1 meeting 2024-02-07

WG1 Meeting Minutes

Key Points:  

• The group discussed the IIFET presentation approach and agreed to focus on gender in dried fish social economies instead of critiquing the neoclassical economic approach to fisheries and fisheries economies.  
• The IIFET conference is an opportunity for the group to structure their thoughts for the synthesis paper.  
• Derek proposes dividing the Google Docs into two parts; the first one would be specific to the IIFET presentation, and the second part would have a broader scope, reflecting on how the current work informs future endeavours.  
• Nireka highlights the importance of having a writing workshop for a quick output on the paper, where the discussants will have a face-to-face meeting and work together, discuss, and immediately write their thoughts.  
• Derek emphasizes the significance of the group’s conceptual contribution in embedding a gender lens in DFM activities in the next three years.  
• The group decided to have regular core group meetings and agreed to meet on February 21, 2024.  
• In preparation for the next meeting, each member will come up with a presentation outline for the IIFET Conference

Minutes:  

Derek: We decided in the last meeting to have the meeting in the core group to allow a more focused and productive discussion. At a certain point, we need to broaden the discussion to include other people in the project who are interested in gender. It is also consistent with our goal since we are trying to include a wide array of different empirical cases for comparison. We need to think about the mechanics of these meetings and the mechanics of integrating those different comparative cases. One option is to have smaller group meetings to steer the process behind the scenes and have occasional larger group meetings to have broader inputs. The second option is to shift entirely to broader meetings.  The regular meetings of this short group proved very productive.  

Holly: I feel like we have some more work to do with what we've been working on.

Nireka: Since we are having a presentation at the IIFET conference, we should frame it and come up with some bullet points and the presentation outline. We are still doing a lot of discussion but haven’t honed on what exactly we’re going to be.  

We have some quite interesting discussions, but they are not structured enough yet. We can have an outline of the synthesis.  

Derek: It does return us to the main task that we had proposed for today's meeting, which is to see whether the three sections at the top of the Google doc allow us to or move us towards that focus and then how to hone it further.

Holly: We need to hone our ideas. I think there are a few terms and sort of relationships that we might need to refine. What we have done in the last four or five months needs to be more focused, which then could maybe be the basis of a paper or something.

Derek: Here, I've added the two-panel proposals to the folder where we have the Google doc. I'm now sharing it with you all. Please pull up the Google Doc if you don't have it already, and then let's work on that. We could start with Holly's point.

It might make sense to start by saying what we’re proposing to present at the conference. Is it how a gendered lens provides an important critique of classical economic perspectives? Is it that shift from the vertical to the horizontal, the contextualization of economic behaviour in a social economy way that a gender-gendered lens allows us, affords us?

Nireka: We need to frame the presentation in a way that is appropriate for the economics conference. Maybe not go into details, but somehow, what kind of approach are we taking? There is feminist economics. We are also dealing with value chains or commodity chains or whatever. Are we just talking about gender in social economies or gender in value chains or commodity chains? The commodity chains and value chains are economic concepts. However, the social economy is very broad, but on the other hand, I mean the VFM is about the social economy. We have to place whatever approach we’re doing within that broad framework of social economy. We need to decide what the framing is going to be and then, you know, also our approaches.

We have discussed feminist economics, political ecology, the material feminist approach and so on. So, what exactly are we doing?

Holly: There is also the empirical side, new insights on how the dried fish economy works. I’m thinking of taking a feminist gendered approach means asking new and different questions about how economies work, and, in this case, dried fish economies work that classical economics hasn't asked to date.  

Classical economics focuses on certain things, questions, and issues, and other things that are ignored or obfuscated. So, I think we can ask how this perspective allows us to ask new and different questions, which can then lead to other new and deeper insights into how generally economies function.

Derek: If we take that approach, I think that makes sense for this conference, and it makes sense in terms of what we're trying to do in DFM. We need to confidently present a characterization of neoclassical economic approaches to value chains and fisheries. Then, we need to show how the social economy perspective theoretically and methodologically diverges from that and raises new practical insights that address some of the failings of neoclassical economic proposals for interventions in fisheries and in fisheries economies.

That would be very provocative like that. That would require us to go out on a limb, make some pretty bold assertions about the discipline, who is hosting the conference and then open ourselves up to economists saying, well, no, you've totally mischaracterized what we do.

I have a good friend who's a Berkeley-trained neoclassical economist, and I have these conversations with him, and I say, well, this is what we're trying to do in anthropology. And he says, oh, no, Economics already does that. It's embedded in our logic, you just don't understand economics. So we need to be neo-classically trained economists on our team and need to be ready to engage with people who make statements like that.

Holly: We could also not necessarily take on neoclassical economics full-on; not engage too much in a critique of neoclassical economics. Rather, look at gender and these other kinds of things.

Derek: Or instead of being confrontational, be right relationship building and say these are the strengths like these are the methodological strengths of neoclassical economics. It provides us with tools for making generalizations about populations. But we also need qualitative approaches to complement those.  

Nireka: I think, we'll just sort of get into trouble if we do this in a really broad sense of neoclassical economics. I think it's better to stick with things that we know about how value chains are analyzed by economies and how we are analyzing it that's more straightforward.

I mean, the vertical and the horizontal things, we understand what we're doing, and we know what the economies are doing. But if you take the whole new classical economy as opposed to the social economy approach, I think that would be a bit too much, and I mean, basically, what we are arguing is that whether it's social economies or neo-classical economy, it has to be gender inclusive right. That is the thing. I mean, even within the social economy, you can have a social economy approach without being gender inclusive, right? However, it should be because gender relations are one of the social relations that you should look at. I mean, often, it's not right; look at Polanyi and the great transformation. So, I think we need not go into that broad issue of neoclassical versus social economy. We should look at it in terms of the dried fish value chains that we are working on and what has not been looked at when you look at dried fish value chains by not taking into account gender.

Derek: There are different degrees of gender analysis; a neoclassical approach might incorporate gender simply by ensuring that there is gender balance. In terms of the sampling approach, that's a very shallow approach to gender inclusivity. Whereas, a social economy perspective would position men's and women's divergent access to resources in in their specific context. So, it necessitates attention to qualitative forms of power that are very difficult to measure through survey instruments. So, methodologically there the social economy perspective or the sociocultural anthropology or the human geography perspective suggests that methodologically, the neoclassical perspective is short.

I would like to see a recognition by the neoclassical economists that diverse methodological approaches need to be integrated.  

Holly: I don't even want to engage in a critique of neoclassical economics; we just demonstrate this is what a deep theory of gender. There are degrees of gender integration. If we take this gender relations approach that we've been thinking through in a really deep way. This is, you know, what it can tell us about the social economy of dried fish, and this is what we're sort of learning.

Derek: I think there's a risk of being dismissed as just another bunch of qualitative social scientists or gender specialists doing their qualitative thing, and it doesn't really relate to our sophisticated regression analysis.

Nireka: Yeah, but does that matter because, you know, we're not going to be doing regression analysis, and you know, I mean, we are using this opportunity to get our thinking processes a little bit structured? So it doesn't really matter whether the economies you know think that you know you're not economistic enough or not. I mean, we just try to figure out how we all, think of it as a group in synthesizing our findings and how we continue with our research. I mean wherever there are gaps, identifying gaps where we have to work on, I think we should set our goals and just use the conference whether they like it or not.

Nikita: I agree completely with what both Holly and Nireka said. I don't think we have to prove anything to anyone. We're doing work that needs to be done, and I think we can put that across. As Holly said, if it is really sort of agreed to, they've been working behind the scenes to get that gender workshop done. I think we should just go ahead and do it. Maybe we can change their perspective in some way after they get to listen to us.

Derek: If there's an ongoing effort to broaden IIFET as an organization, then we can contribute to that effort by providing another nuanced gender-informed analysis. If that wasn't the case, however, and if you were just pragmatically taking advantage of this conference to talk to ourselves, then I would say, well, why invest the money? And I think why we don’t just have a workshop where we can have more time in fact to deal with these ideas.

Nikita: I think there's a conscious effort this time to bring in a lot of students and young researchers. So, if our panel can in some way encourage them or show them a way to do research and research in some other way that they have not been trained so far, I think that will be a positive contribution.

Derek: I mean, the fact that Eddie is one of the leads as well is promising because Eddie is obviously quite broad-thinking.  

Holly: So, I think we just proceed with what we've been doing.  

Derek: So then we need to move to, like, what are we going to do? When do we want to have the next meeting? What is the homework between now and the next meeting?

Holly: I think I made a comment about our research questions. Can we spend a couple of minutes talking about this? I think things unfold over space and time. But anyway, we don't have to talk about it now. I think we need to think about what the action verb is and who the actor actually can be like. For example, how does time influence gender relations? Gender relations change over time.

Nireka: Historically, gender relations have changed. That was my idea when I when I say space and time, how have gender relations changed in particular locations historically? I was just thinking that if you had to do a presentation, maybe we can all have sort of an attempt at how an outline of a presentation would look like, and then we try to synthesize across our different outlines.

Derek: So that would be the homework assignment.

Nireka: I mean, the thing is otherwise, that way, we could get it, maybe, get to something faster. This way, you have to be going to bullet points and be fairly clear about what you're going to present and what you're proposing, right? For example, the stuff that I wrote was also about not our state of knowledge right now but what we propose to do now and what we need to do. Where are the gaps?  

But here we concretely have a proposal, I'm sorry, a presentation to do on the state of our knowledge as of now. So then, it's easier in that sense because we have only so much that we can present right now.

Holly: If we think in terms of a research agenda, the presentation is a milestone in terms of concretizing our research agenda.

Derek: It's a stock-taking moment. So I wonder if we should divide the document into two and have a document that's specific to the milestone, so specific to what we think are the key things we need to present at IIFET based on what we have learned so far.  

A second document that is broader and thinking about how the work we've done so far informs what needs to be done in the future. And that can include the last three years of DFM, but it also can include other projects that are inspired by what we do in this project. Does that make sense?

Nireka: Yes, we may not worry about how well you could also present the future in the presentation, right? Identify the gaps and say we need to look at this in the future.

Derek: Yeah, it makes sense as a wrap-up part of the conclusion of the presentation.

As you know, coordinating the project is pretty important for me because, arising from the Kolkata meeting, we're sort of concretizing what DFM is going to be doing in the next three years. This group is important because it sort of conceptually embedded a gender perspective in the DFM activities for the last three years of the project. So, how does a gender lens inform the stock value chain service that we're going to do? How does a gender lens inform our understanding of consumption patterns as they influence the health of different groups in different places? How does a gender lens inform the policy briefs around the different substantive, methodological recommendations that we make coming out of this project? I want to practically integrate the thinking of this group into those activities, So that may be less of a concern for the rest of you, except for those of you who are involved.

It's a concern for the rest of you, like Nirika, you and Dilanthi who are working together to define what's going to come out of the Sri Lanka scoping. Holly and Nikita, you're working with the Karnataka group to figure out what to do on the West Coast on the basis of your scoping in Karnataka and Kerala and maybe in Maharashtra, maybe in Gujarat as well. Kiyoko is working with Sereyvath and CIRD to develop gender-sensitive economic development strategies at the very local scale.

I would say that let's live with that trouble because we don't have that much time left in the project. However, my experience in academic and intellectual work is that the periods of overwhelm are actually fruitful. Out of the periods of overwhelm, you move forward.

Nireka: The thing is this kind of paper would come so quickly if we could have one day, like you know, a writing workshop, where we have a face-to-face meeting and we work together, discuss, put something immediately on the computer as we discuss this would you know come together very fast. But the way we are working right now, it's not very conducive to getting this discussion moving because we just meet like once every month or so and then by that time, so many other things have happened, and it's difficult to focus. We need really some focused activity here, not just talking but putting things while we talk, putting something into an outline.

Derek: My suggestion then is we meet again in two weeks, and the advantage of a two-week deadline is that it's a little more real than a one-month deadline. Then, we all addressed the homework assignment that we defined for ourselves in those two weeks. I guess the homework assignment is working on the outline for the presentation. Do we agree to do that?

Nireka: I think that would be useful to me.

Holly: I mean, it definitely would be useful to me. Like, how much time have we spent just kind of remembering what we talked about a month ago and now it's like late at night for you? We need some focused time to work on it.

Derek: Okay, then, we'll continue to work on the shared document, but maybe we'll strip out the stuff that is broader and keep it narrowly focused or maybe even better. I'll set up a new document, which will become our presentation outline, and then we'll use the first document as our source, and we'll draw in stuff from that to inform the different sections of the presentation.

Nireka: That would be one sort of version of an outline, right? We were talking about doing different versions of outlines and seeing whether we could bring them together. But by going through the other material, I think we might be at a different point now as well. Then what about this?  

Holly: How about we meet in two weeks and the homework and the agenda for that meeting is to outline the presentation. The homework is to think about what the presentation should be: focus, structure, and content. What kind of key points do we want to cover in the presentation?

Derek: But then we should distribute our draft outlines to each other in advance of the meeting.

Holly: The homework is to come to the meeting with ideas about how this presentation should be structured.

Nireka: I think it's different from what was there before because before, we actually wrote text sort of in abstract form, and that's not what we want to be doing here. We want to be doing it as an outline in bullet form.

Derek: Two weeks from now is the week of the 19th, is that OK? I'm travelling on the 22nd, so the 21st would be a good day, or the 19th or the 21st would work for me.

Holly: I'd probably prefer the 21st.

Nireka: The 21st is okay for me as well.  

Nikita: Okay with me.

Kyoko: the 21st works for me as well.  

Derek: Kyoko and Nikita are good with that homework assignment. I've just invited you all to the Google Docs; I've shared the doc and the two session proposals that we put together, and it's the second one that is the focus. The first one is just for information's sake, the old version.

Before we go, can I just ask who is already planning to go to IIFET and who already has the funding to get themselves there? Could we just do a round?

Holly: I'm going, I'm going, and I have my own funding.

Nireka: In July, right? I'm unlikely to go, and I don't have funding.

Derek: If you had funding, would you be more likely to go in July?

Nireka: Might, consider it.

Derek: Okay, let's see. My allocation of funds to having you do something else instead is because I think we're going to have a pretty good representation.

Nireka: Yeah, there's no reason for everybody to go. And I'm not, you know, dying to go there at all.

Nikita:  Yeah, I'll be going, and I’ve funding. Nikita's giving one of the keynote addresses, actually.

Kyoko: Yes, I’m going, and I have to see where I can charge my cost.  

Derek: Great! I'll send out a Zoom invitation for the 21st morning our time. I’ll also share the documents with you all.