Caring in the time of Covid, in Indonesia

July 2021

This morning, like every morning in the past weeks (I can’t remember exactly how many), when I get my phone to view my WhatsApp messages, I prepare myself to see and hear death. My relatives’ death, my friend’s death, my friend’s families, my friend’s friend, my neighbours, my neighbours’ families. And the list continues.

My ears go numb from hearing ambulance’ sirens, announcement of neighbors’ death from nearby mosques. It feels numb now to listen to such stories of death, how they were well, healthy, kind people. How they struggled at the end of their lives to find the care they needed (not all, but many, mostly). How they were alone (without their loved ones) in their final days of struggle.

My eyes are exhausted from reading death, pain, suffering and precarity. The news is full of death. Crowdfunding is filled with stories of people losing jobs that can not afford food for their families. Twitter is flooded with sad, desperate updates. I want to close my eyes and stop listening.  But closing my eyes makes the demon even bigger and scarier.

My heart used to feel anger. But now I feel scared. It feels like days go by and I wait for my turn. What if I need medical care (which is almost impossible to get now)? What if I don’t make it? What would it feel like to leave my two young children forever?

My head is just full, no space left there.

I and I see people have done what they can do, we try to care more. But nothing we do is enough. People are still starving. People are still struggling. People are still in pain. And those in power do not seem to understand the weight of ordinary people in their everyday life. They live in their bubble.

The day I finished this draft, a friend passed away (Monday evening, 19 July 2021, Bogor, Indonesia). He was a kind, loving husband and father to his 4 years old son. Healthy, young, just started a small workshop that provided income for 5 employees and their families. I contacted him at the end of last month, June, when I heard that his wife was infected with Covid and needed to self-isolate, and he was fine back then. He asked me to pray for him and his family to make it through. A week or so ago I knew that he was admitted to the hospital because he was infected and had problems breathing. Then he got worse – but not too worse – judging from the video he showed in his WhatsApp status. I kept on sending him messages (I asked him not to reply). I sent prayers. Then he said to his wife that he got better, tested negative, but was still in the hospital to improve his health. Two days later, he departed.

I got angry with the government, with God, with him. What an untrusted ruler to let their people dying to breathe and survive. What a cruel God to take him away when he had so much to live on. I got angry at him for not fighting harder, how dare he leave his very young son behind. People are unfair, the world is unfair. Every day is really hard to navigate. I got so many questions in my head in these terribly difficult times. I can’t even start to understand.

 

24 Aug 2021

I find it hard to decide whether I should share it or keep it in my folder, contained safely – suppressing my emotions and not letting it show – as the world tells us to do – be strong, be resilient. But then, two days ago, a good friend’s husband passed away, after two weeks of struggle in the hospital. Their sons are similar in age with mine and used to be in the same class in their school. That’s how I met my friend (the wife). She offered me her friendship, despite our differences. This gives me a push to share these small notes, to grieve and to remember them.

 

16 Sept 2021

Thinking and acting Care with FPE

My journey with FPE (Feminist Polirical Ecology) tells me to be reflective, to listen to stories embodied by others, my own stories. María Puig de la Bellacasa said that care is a matter of innocence as well as non-innocence and situatedness of care. 

Covid changes the way of caring. I do not have many friends but meeting occasionally and especially when we are in difficult times has always been a feature of our relationship. Being close and looking into their eyes, listening to their lived struggles, are a way of caring that I found healing – or at least it helps me to survive another day (both as the recipient or giver of care). But then Covid rules say that being close to each other, and having physical contact, is the opposite of caring. We struggle to connect and sense through words in our WhatsApp and voices over the phone, as video calls seems too much during bad days.

And therefore we scramble trying to find ways to stay with the trouble (famously said by Donna Haraway) – do we have other options anyway? (As I read from Anna (Tsing, 2015) in her book in ruin of capitalism context): Continue or maintain life – forget repair. At that point when my friends even find it hard to breathe, to survive. I just want to continue life (make every day bearable) and leave repairing to another time and space.

“in the most general sense,  care is a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we may live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”
Berenice Fisher and Joan C. Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring,” in Circles of Care, ed. Emily K. Abel and Margaret Nelson (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990) in (Tronto, 2015) emphasis added.

Caring is indeed not necessarily a feel-good thing, Bellacasa mentions this in her book Matters of care (Bellacasa, 2017). Caring means being emotionally drained for days when your good friend is ill and you see them pass away. Caring means that no matter how I feel shattered, I need to get up and be there for my young children.

Reciprocity is something in care that FPE scholars have attended to, and I find it in my everyday experience of care for my young children. The time I care for my young children (who are not able to take care of themselves yet), it is also the time I feel cared for. Maybe it is the kind of reciprocity that might be different with the conventional reciprocity “This is because reciprocity involves giving, receiving, and returning what has been given” (Mauss, 1974 in (Gómez Becerra & Muneri-Wangari, 2021)). My young children at this care relation do not necessarily return what I gave to them, but still their mere existence fuels my everyday life (in positive and negative sense) – me talking from the perspective of a mother from the Global South, with a partner attending to one school age child (online school for 1.5 year now) and one toddler. After all the pain of losing I experience, I might not be whole now if not for my children.

 

Readings that helped me with this piece:

Bellacasa, M. P. de la. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. The University of Minnesota Press.

Gómez Becerra, M., & Muneri-Wangari, E. (2021). Practices of Care in Times of COVID-19. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 3(June), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2021.648464

Tronto, J. C. (2015). Who Cares? How to Reshape a Democratic Politics (First). Cornell University Press.

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. In PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS (Vol. 1). Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004

 

New article: “Practices of Care in Times of COVID-19”

Our researchers Marlene Gómez Becerra and Eunice Muneri-Wangari published a paper on “Frontiers in Human Dynamics”: Practices of Care in Times of COVID-19. They also explained how this publication came into being:

“We saw in this health crisis the ideal scenario for rethinking and listening to other forms of life and to recognize diverse practices of care that can work as a vehicle of social change. Questioning these practices motivated us to write this paper”

 

Abstract:

We argue that the COVID-19 virus has been a trigger for emerging practices of care by being an actor with agency that transforms the everyday life of subjects by placing them under uncertainty. Therefore, this paper aims to show how practices of care emerged or were maintained as vulnerable groups were confronted by restrictions to movement and uncertainties following the outbreak of COVID-19. We demonstrate this using two case studies of the Maasai pastoral community in Narok, Kenya and the community kitchens in the city of Berlin, Germany. Thus, we seek to show how practices of care for, care about, and care with are carried out by the members of these communities during pandemic times. Granted that care remains highly contentious in feminist literature, this paper contributes to a growing body of literature on care in Feminist Political Ecology by broadening the conceptualization of care. The research builds on a typology of care relations based on practices of distribution, exchange, and reciprocity. This allows us to show when care is exercised in a unidirectional and hierarchical way and when in a multidirectional way reinforcing social bonds of responsibility and collective care that transcends the socio-nature boundaries.

The article is Open Access and you can read the full paper here.

Covid-19 pandemic and oil spills in the Ecuadorian Amazon: The confluence of two crisis

How can we reframe the current planetary crisis to find ways for decisive and life-changing collective action? The Amazon region of Ecuador, at the center of two crises –Covid-19 and a major oil spill–, but also home to a long history of indigenous resistance, offers some answers.

Navigating two crises

In Ecuador, the intensification of resource extraction and pollution, floods and weather disturbances have hit hardest marginalized populations. Indigenous peoples and people living in the Amazon have continuously suffered an enormous political and economic disadvantage when confronting extractive industries and allied state bodies. The vulnerability of the peoples and territory of the Ecuadorian Amazon region has been even more severely exposed during the Covid-19 lockdown period which began 16 March 2020.

On 7 April 2020, the Trans-Ecuadorian Oil Pipeline System and the Heavy Crude Oil Pipeline, which transport Ecuador’s oil production, collapsed. The pipelines were built along the banks of the Coca River and the collapse resulted in the spillage of an enormous quantity of crude oil into its waters. The Coca river is a key artery in the regional Amazon system. It runs through three national parks that form one of the richest biodiverse areas on Earth, which has been historically preserved by the ways of life of the indigenous peoples who inhabit it.

Read the full article here

Wendy Harcourt is co-author of this blog published on Undisciplined Environments

 

Creative engagements on the front lines – webinar

24 June 2020 12:00 – 13:30 – BST free online event

Creative practices are central to activism on the front lines of resistance against forces that are changing the skin of the planet. Viruses don’t stop machines, and extractive practices continue despite the current pandemic, affecting organising and creating. How do creative engagements on the front lines continue in a pandemic? How does COVID-19 emphasise the importance of continued acts of solidarity and resistance? What are ways of continuing the ‘doing’ but also new ways of ‘not doing’ or ‘doing differently’?

In anticipation of the launch of Extracting Us, an online collaborative exhibition and conversation, artists-activists-scholars will share their experiences of doing this work: Tracy Glynn, participatory action researcher studying at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, Edgar Xakriabá, Denilson Baniwa and Jaider Esbell, independent artists and activists based in Brazil, Negar Elodie Behzadi, Lecturer at the University of Bristol working in Tajikistan, and Daiara Tukano, independent artists activist educator and researcher based in Brasilia Brazil (TBC).

Katy Beinart from the University of Brighton will then host a discussion with Persephone Pearl, co-director at ONCA Gallery in Brighton, Jamille Pinheiro Dias, Research Associate at the University of Manchester, and Wendy Harcourt, Professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

The webinar will finish with 25 minutes of questions and discussion with participants, who will also be invited to contribute actively during the event.

Free event, places are limited. Sign up at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/creative-engagements-on-the-front-lines-tickets-107840738552

The Extracting Us exhibition and conversation series are being co-curated by Siti Maimunah, Elona Hoover, Alice Owen, Dian Ekowati and Becky Elmhirst.

This project has received support from ONCA Gallery, the Centre of Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at the University of Brighton, WEGO-ITN European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 764908. We are also grateful for the collaboration of members of The British Academy funded project ‘Sustainable’ Development and Atmospheres of Violence: Experiences of Environmental Defenders.

Extracting Us. Creative engagements on the front lines 

COVID-19 and the future of farmers and fisherfolk in Indonesia – webinar

Siti Maimunah was speaking in a webinar about ‘the COVID-19 pandemic and the future of farmer and fisherfolk in Indonesia, who Care?’  on May 16, 2020. The information and video are in Indonesian.

WEBINAR, Pusat Studi Islam Perempuan dan Pembangunan (PSIPP) ITB Ahmad Dahlan Jakarta mengundang Ibu/Bapak, teman-teman dalam kegiatan diskusi bertema:

Nasib Nelayan dan Petani di Masa Pandemik, Siapa Peduli?
Sabtu, 16 Mei 2020
Jam 13.30 – selesai
Pengantar
Yulianti Muthmainnah (Ketua PSIPP ITB-AD Jakarta)
Pemantik
Mukhaer Pakkanna (Rektor ITB-AD Jakarta): temuan hasil penelitian nelayan perempuan
Narasumber
– Sutia Budi (Ketua Umum Jaringan Nelayan Matahari dan Wakil Rektor I ITB-AD Jakarta)
– Riza Damanik (Staf Khusus Menteri Koperasi dan UKM)
– Nissa Wargadipura (Pendiri Pesantren Ekologi At-Thaariq, Garut-Jawa Barat)
Siti Maimunah (Kandidat PhD Univ. Passau, WEGO-ITN Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow)
– Bachtiar Dwi Kurniawan (Sekretaris Majelis Pemberdayaan Masyarakat PP Muhammadiyah)
Moderator: Suparman (Ketua Umum DPD IMM DKI Jakarta, Mahasiswa Pascasarjana ITB-AD Jakarta)

[LIVE STREAMING] Nasib Nelayan dan Petani di Masa Pandemik, Siapa Peduli?

WEBINAR, Pusat Studi Islam Perempuan dan Pembangunan (PSIPP) ITB Ahmad Dahlan Jakarta mengundang Ibu/Bapak, teman-teman dalam kegiatan diskusi bertema:Nasib Nelayan dan Petani di Masa Pandemik, Siapa Peduli?Sabtu, 16 Mei 2020 Jam 13.30 – selesaiPengantarYulianti Muthmainnah (Ketua PSIPP ITB-AD Jakarta)PemantikMukhaer Pakkanna (Rektor ITB-AD Jakarta): temuan hasil penelitian nelayan perempuan.Narasumber- Sutia Budi (Ketua Umum Jaringan Nelayan Matahari dan Wakil Rektor I ITB-AD Jakarta)- Riza Damanik (Staf Khusus Menteri Koperasi dan UKM)- Nissa Wargadipura (Pendiri Pesantren Ekologi At-Thaariq, Garut-Jawa Barat)- Siti Maimunah (Kandidat PhD Univ. Passau, WEGO-ITN Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow)- Bachtiar Dwi Kurniawan (Sekretaris Majelis Pemberdayaan Masyarakat PP Muhammadiyah)Moderator: Suparman (Ketua Umum DPD IMM DKI Jakarta, Mahasiswa Pascasarjana ITB-AD Jakarta)

Geplaatst door ITB Ahmad Dahlan op Vrijdag 15 mei 2020

Hunger & the COVID-19 crisis: join a call

How will India ensure food for all?

Join a call with AID partners and friends Bilal Khan, Seema Kulkarni, Harsh Mander, Ashish Ranjan, Kiran Vissa and Kamayani Swami where they talk about the current challenges and their recommendations.

Sunday April 19, 2020. (8.30 AM PT, 11.30 AM ET, 9 PM IST)

From March madness to marathon: seeing possibility within pandemic

Field Notes —

THE SKILLS WE EMBRACE NOW CAN SHAPE A BETTER WORLD

By Rob Snyder, Ph.D.
President, Island Institute

Along the coast, March madness is a state of mind linked to living off diminishing savings from last summer, the uncertainty of livelihoods linked to the next tourism and lobstering seasons, isolation, and bracing for a few final snowstorms. Most years, this lasts through April.

During an average spring, I am concerned about the social fabric of the coast as stresses increase on community, economy, and home life. I worry about the impacts that this time of year can have on people who struggle with mental illness and addiction.

Now add the pandemic. I can’t think of a worse-case scenario for communities that are already experiencing their most difficult time of year.

Our communities are not idyllic. Our communities are imperfect, challenging, and beautiful places. Above all, they are communities. Fortunately, they are resilient communities built on helping each other, even when folks don’t like each other much.

March wasn’t only maddening, it was a month filled with grieving, as we paused the lives we were leading and moved to a new and unknown way of life. This new life would be defined by integrating teaching, daycare, supporting loved ones (at a distance), home offices, isolation, and sometimes all of this at once. At the same time, even those who thought they had steady jobs are now concerned about income and healthcare.

For weeks, we would plan for the next two weeks. As a friend of mine reflected, “I kept sprinting to the end of the week—toward what I thought it would take to get to a new normal, and once I made it to the end of the week, everything changed again. After a few weeks of this, I was exhausted.”

I was living and seeing this exhaustion everywhere. And I concluded that sprinting is the wrong approach when you are running a marathon.

An important shift in mindset started to emerge, driven by data showing that the pandemic would not end soon and reinforced by leadership that couldn’t clearly see an end in sight. Collectively, we began shifting to a marathon runner’s mindset, albeit one with no map and not knowing when the next aid station would appear.

What does it take to successfully integrate all aspects of our lives with this longer term, uncertain future in mind, when so many different aspects of life require navigating all at once?

The good news: I see people being vulnerable and relying on others out of necessity. When you are faced with a complex problem or a series of related problems, it requires thinking from across many domains of expertise. Within days of acknowledging the local impacts of the pandemic, towns began meeting in new ways that cut across all services. School leaders, healthcare officials, town managers, and transportation providers are meeting weekly to trouble shoot new challenges.

What should ease the burden a bit is that it’s not just one person’s job to solve all the problems of the week. These problems are shared across the group, increasing the creativity and resources brought to bear. By sharing the burden, leaders are less likely to burn out.

What can each of us offer to one another during the pandemic? What is happening in your neighborhood or community that can help each of us imagine what might be needed in the short term—the next few weeks—or the longer term—the next three months?

What are you witnessing that you hope never ends? What acts of kindness, generosity, sharing of work, and changes in attitude are evident right now?

How can we become a connected set of people who could quickly assemble and help if extra hands are needed for any number of reasons?

What will we put down and leave behind?

In a recent article in the Financial Times, Arundhati Roy, author of God of Small Things, posed a way of seeing through the pandemic to other possible worlds:

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

I love the vividness of Roy’s challenge. How can we, in the midst of the pandemic, notice and appreciate the best of who we can be, and how we can show up in our communities and bring this forward to a post-pandemic world?

This, to me, is the hope we can find as we navigate the disruptive times ahead. The new world we will inhabit is filled with possibility.

seeing possibility within pandemicRob Snyder, Ph.D.
President
Island Institute

As President of the Island Institute, Rob is responsible for working with island and coastal leaders, in Maine and around the world, to identify innovative approaches to community sustainability. He also works with staff across all programmatic and strategic priority areas to help the Institute identify and address emerging challenges faced by these communities and exchange ideas and experiences to further the sustainability of communities here and elsewhere. Read his full bio here or connect with him on Twitter and Instagram.

A memory from pre-corona times – a visit to Montevideo March 2020

A memory from pre-corona times

Looking at these four photos now, taken when I was visiting Ana Agostino and Constance Dupuis in Montevideo Uruguay March 6-13 it seems a life time, not just two weeks ago. My visit included what today would be an unthinkably risky schedule. Together with Ana and Constance (and our partners) on 7 March we attended the opening of the Plaza Las Pioneras, a collective feminist space mingling with 100s of people in a joyful celebration of reclaiming disused space for feminist arts and culture and politics. On 8 March we were marching with 350,000 people through the centre of Montevideo singing, chanting. I admired all the energy and vision around me. In all these encounters I was constantly being introduced, hugged and kissed. We washed our hands but we were free of the omniscient presence of the Corona virus in our daily life, though it was there in the messages from Italy (where my daughter and others in WEGO were on lockdown) and of increasing worries about what if it were to spread?  

During my visit I went to the Universidad de la República de Uruguay, Montevideo (UdelaR) and the Defensoria de VyV de Montevideo  to discuss the WEGO project and Constance’s project on ageing and to give a talk on Feminist Political Ecology and development dilemmas organised by Javier Taks at the Social Science faculty. More informally, I joined a dialogue with feminists of all ages at the Cotidiano Mujer about feminist political ecology and eco-feminism. I was poised to go on with Ana and Constance to Buenos Aires to meet more feminists in academia and government, when the impact of COVID-19 abruptly hit. Just the day before leaving for Buenos Aires we were informed as I had been in Italy less than two weeks ago, I was not allowed into Argentina, and it rapidly became clear that foreigners were going to be asked to leave Uruguay. 

Now we are in the reality of Corona times it seems incredible how much I could do in that week in Montevideo, and what I took for granted. We could walk, chat, hug, enjoy dinners together, greet and kiss strangers, sit together on crowded buses, visit museums and even go to a Tango concert.

These photos capture those last tranquil moments, as well as the deep friendship and respect I have for Ana Agostino who hosted me. I have known Ana for well over a decade. We share our feminism, our passions and our network of friends overlap. I use her writing on climate justice and post development for my classes, and have been inspired over the years by her on-going commitment to human rights, environmental justice and feminism. I am so pleased she has accepted to be Ombudsperson for WEGO bringing her 5 years of experience of being Ombudsperson at the Defensoria in Montevideo and vice president of Latin America Ombudpersons. 

These photos were taken by Constance in Montevideo and also at La Flores – a seaside area we visited just before I went to the airport. It was here amongst the sea, the flowers and birds that I shared some needed quiet time with Ana and enjoyed this last (for a while)  beautiful sunset of freedom.

Wendy Harcourt

Building communities in times of crisis: creative planning and revisioning for unanticipated changes and contingencies for your WEGO PhD

20 March 2020

Dear WEGO-ers

The Coronavirus outbreak is impacting all of us bringing uncertainty even to the best laid plans, and has required many of you to suddenly leave your research areas and secondments. We recognise that this is causing a lot of upheaval and uncertainty. Please be assured that this does not signal ruin for your PhD nor will it undermine the WEGO network. Right now, the most important thing is that everyone feels safe, supported and stay healthy and that we work out ways to stay in touch and support each other. All the mentors have been in touch with each of you. We respect the decisions you are making in terms of where you want to be at this moment. We have also checked the EU funding requirements which have been adjusted to allow for this situation. We feel it is important to put in place ways to keep the community together to bring you care and support and continued engagement with current global issues from an FPE perspective.

This message is two-fold.  The first is to help you think through how to cope with uncertainty and the unexpected for your PhD project. 

The second is to share with you some ideas of how we can come together as a network at this unexpected and difficult time by building community together and by learning from other on-line communities of practice. 

I Ways to deal with uncertainty, health, planning in your research including revisioning for unanticipated changes and contingencies 

Once the situation becomes clearer, you will need to set out some new schedules and goals for your PhD work. In many respects, the virus outbreak could be likened to the  difficulties some of us faced in our ‘fieldwork’. It is more severe because it is affecting all of us, but in principle, you can find ways through and build contingency plans for your projects. Fieldwork does not make a PhD. The weaving together of ideas from the literature, data, and your analysis of them is what makes a PhD. If your primary data is limited, then think about what kind of secondary sources are available that you can use to fill out your PhD story. You might also eventually think about contributing to the broader scholarship on methods as part of your PhD, especially if the current situation has inspired you to think about how this literature failed to capture some of your experiences during your research.

Principles

Evaluate the “risks”to your project before you start. Re-evaluate as you go along and particularly as circumstances change. Note as FPE scholars, we should use the term ‘risk’ with caution – there are many feminist STS critiques of risk, risk assessment, and risk management (including Foucault’s critique of biopower), and the governmentality and structures of monitoring, surveillance, populationism, social control, pathologization, etc that assume the ‘expert classes’ will manage these various risks to protect the normative order of things. We have to be careful that the language of ‘risk,’ and how it has been historically and is currently being deployed in the current moment resonates too closely with the imperial, surveillance, and carceral state imaginaries.  We need to continue to interrogate the colonialist underpinnings of academic research that sends people to the ‘field’ to ‘uncover’  knowledge that is then brought back to the metropolitan universities. We can be mindful of  Haraway’s expose in Primate Visions in her analyses of the brave white researcher leaving their comfortable lives and families and facing all manner of threats to uncover scientific knowledge about non-human primates.  We need to continue to examine deeply how we understand our WEGO research from an intersectional perspective which situates ourselves and the current uncertain situation.  This why we are using the term: “creative planning and revisioning for unanticipated changes or contingencies”.

Our issue now is how to move forward and to adjust.  As you do so be aware of:

  • Health—infectious disease, accessibility to health care / evacuation provisions, your own health status before going
  • Mental health—isolation, culture shock, communication, mobility, exercise facilities
  • Security situation—history of communitarian politics, conflict, economic stability, local superstitions (Ingrid’s story), timing of elections
  • Transportation—forms of transportation and their risks (small flights, helicopters, trails, roads). Road accidents are the number 1 risk of fieldwork in many places!! 
  • Unavailable data—this can sometimes be because a data source (statistics or aerial photos, etc) is not released to you, or because you have to leave your field site, or because people you expected to talk to are not around.
  • Socialization: any culture has a different way to socialize interpersonal relationships, socialize problems and solutions, to speak about something is an art and it happens differently in different cultures. It is important to take care about how you socialize in what way and when in order to avoid negative reactions unintentionally.  Pay attention be careful what questions you ask in relation to cultural or personal habits
  • Gender Based Violence: remember to take care and be aware of the possibility for psychological, verbal, physical and sexual violence as well as being stalked online and by phone. Be aware you may have to overcome difficulties be sure you know your rights, have access to information, and organizations and networks who fight GBV as well as access to legal and health services.

Planning the ‘risks’ connected to your research.

All ‘fieldwork’ carries a variety of objective ‘risks’ as above. You will not be able to deal with all of them. You may well need to think of new plans and change your research due to the virus. Some things to keep in mind if you are not in your own country or going to remote areas to do research. 

  • Contact your embassy, (not all countries have embassies in Nepal, for example) If no, ask in advance which embassy your country relies on for any documentation or where the nearest embassy is.  Notify your embassy in advance about your research period. This could be useful in case of any crisis and if you are lost and without money  they can assist you. In Nepal, for example, they will not send a rescue team unless they have your information.
  • Make sure someone you trust (better two people) know where you are at all times, both locally and externally. If mobile phones and social media go down, how will you communicate? If there is a major problem, who is your first point of contact and do they know how to reach others in your network, can they mobilise rescue services? Always carry phone numbers for your embassy, evacuation services and your health 
  • Gather information. Pay close attention to the overall local situation and also to the research issue you are working on. Make relationships, ask how things are daily. It can be useful for your research but is also important in terms of understanding when the security situation might change.
  • When the different ‘risks’ come together, small problems can become big ones. An infection from a leech bite is annoying unless you find that you need to walk for several days to evacuate your field site, or you get another problem (stomach bug). Then the infection can be life threatening. Your immune system can drop quickly when exposed to multiple pressures. Mitigation: be vigilant with hygiene, treat all problems seriously and avoid putting too much pressure on yourself on a day-to-day basis.
  • Transportationis often significantly safer if you spend more money or travel with others. Consider what options you have and balance that with the impression you give local respondents. Don’t be afraid to ask drivers to slow down or get out and find another mode of transportation if possible. Drivers and others sharing a bus/taxi with you have their own social lives and political connections, which can affect your work, safety and how others see your political positioning (see Ingrid’s article in Area about this).
  • Be transparent with your research goals. Let local people who are not necessarily participants know what you are doing. Make sure you have a solid and reliable network of people who believe in what you are doing. This can help if things suddenly shift and you find yourself subject to suspicion. 
  • Always leave yourself amarginto cope with the unexpected! Whether that is the timing of leaving field sites, the number of hours you work a day (avoid exhaustion), back-ups of your data, extra chargers for your phone, extra pair of eye glasses (!), extra medicines you do not expect to use.
  • Bring what you need. Music, a diary, a yoga mat, chocolate, a sleeping bag, a large towel, or extra phone credit to call abroad/surf the net are all good examples of things that can help keep your mental and physical health strong. Do not be afraid to have a few ‘home comforts’ with you.
  • Think through alternatives to your ‘dream’ project. If you cannot get the data you need, what other questions or data sources are available? 

The unexpected

Most research projects have to be changed or redesigned because of unexpected events. This could be what you are facing now. This should not be cause for panic. Rather, this is the moment when you revisit your research goals, theoretical interests, and think creatively about what you have and how to fill data gaps. This is one reason why a good research design to begin with is so important. It is the foundation from which you can rethink the project as needed and the initial process teaches you how to do so. If you do not have a good research design now, or if your project has changed dramatically due to the coronavirus, then take this opportunity to draft one.

  • Think through your research goals, which ones need to be dropped? Does dropping them make the work too ‘thin’? If so, can you add new goals that do not require your presence in a field site? (see c.)
  • Take stock of what data you have gathered. What story is emerging? Are there obvious gaps? How can you fill them?
  • What can you find out remotely? Can you ask go on-line is it possible someone locally is in the position to collect data for you? Can you use archives? Do you need to ask a historically or policy driven question in order to fill out an ethnographic study that was cut short?
  • Can you write down some of your experiences and lessons learned thus far in terms of ‘the conduct of research’ (methods)? Might you have a compelling story that could turn into an article or chapter that would be useful to others?

Another interesting resource on fieldwork in pandemics from Deborah Lupton can be found here:

At the end of the document we share stories of how some of the WEGO mentors have approached their  research and how they faced the unexpected

II Building a WEGO on-line community practice – towards post Corona times

No doubt many of you belong to networks that are circulating inspiring ideas and stories of how people are coming together in solidarity to share, comfort and work together in these difficult times. We would like to encourage such inspiring sharing among WEGO as well, creating a collaborative WEGO space.

In this space we can share how COVID-19 is impacting our different worlds and help build an intersectional ‘FPE’ response linked to other conversations in which we are participating. The mentors group on Whats App has been sharing YouTube clips on teachers surviving doing on-line classes, poetry and our concerns about how to build practices of care among students and teachers among WEGO.

While we have our two WhatsApp groups, and our somewhat clumsy Mycelium space, it seems important at this moment to create one shared space where we can exchange insights and reflections and build up our responses and ways of coping.

For example, the CERN listserv has been sharing many interesting ideas and articles on community ways of coping and learning to care differently in these dark times. Some readings (a few have been shared already on the What’s App):

See also Ethics of Precaution: Individual and Systemic Risk

Many of these writings centre around thinking positively about these times of uncertainty asking questions about “To what kind of world is going to emerge from this crisis? How will we have changed, individually and collectively?” Crisis creates change, and so this is an extraordinary  time for imagining and advocating for socio-economic and ecological change. WEGO can help make the links between the Corona crisis and broader socio, environmental and political-economic situation and how to turn this time into one where we can apply our intersectional analysis in ways that can work for positive, sustainable and equitable change. For example, how to can we radically degrow;  put systems in place that address economic distribution; regenerative agriculture; change in consumption and travel; how to move towards governance that can prevent and deal with shocks and pandemics, etc. 

It is important (and inspiring) to discuss these bigger political questions around justice and equality, care and commoning, and embodied political ecologies that interest many of us at a deep level. It will could be that you can build from this discussion,  how your topic of research is affected by the crisis, and how you find insights in FPE that can produce a caring and ecologically just response could transform the situation. Making the current crisis part of their research can help you to deal with it. 

In order to set up the space to do this, we will explore (again) how to set up a listserv perhaps using a gmail account so we can share our ideas there as well as the more spontaneous Whats App groups and our weekly zoom meeting.

We will set up a regular weekly Zoom on Thursdays (making sure it can work in all time zones) where anyone (hopefully many of us) from the WEGO network can  join in for a quick catch up. We want this space to be somewhere to share concerns, express anxieties and difficulties, while also discuss plan B for your research, and reflect on the situation more broadly, building on our intellectual strengths. 

Be reassured that delays and adjustments to the research plans are understandable, and that at this point of the epidemic we are all “digesting” what is happening and try to adapt to it in different temporalities. You can and should put your health, security and well being as a priority. This will mean you will work less intensely while you are taking care of yourself and others. While we are all living in different circumstances we hope WEGO will continue to build a community where we can listen, share and support each other. 

The Mentors – including Sharmini – will all be working in this period as best we can – we are privileged that most of us have salaried jobs – let us make the most of it! We hope you found this useful and we look forward to continuing the conversation.

 III The principles guiding the changes to WEGO PhD projects
  • WEGO’s priority is that all the students are safe and well and feel secure.
  • WEGO will go slow mindful of the collective grief and emotions we are all feeling.
  • Changes to the PhD project will come through a series of consultations among PhDs, mentors and partners involved in each of the 15 projects.
  • WEGO will aim to build a community of care and support through weekly meetings and on-line training lab in June in 2020.
  • WEGO has appointed an ombudsperson Dr Ana Agostino who is available for consultation for all members of the WEGO project providing advice in relation to complications and conflicts that might occur with mentor(s), supervision,  personal conflict, etc.
IV How Mentors have experienced uncertainty and change in their field work:
Ingrid Nelson photo

Ingrid

I was definitely feeling anxiety during my PhD when my field site ended up being a focal point of a regional cholera epidemic in 2010. I had wonderful hosts in Mozambique keeping an eye on me and ensuring my safety…but about half the village insisted I was purposely giving them cholera with a white powder (these kinds of rumors have a long history in Mozambique and beyond…there are several books and articles about this, which have offered political and class-based analyses among others…I’m writing about more place-based aspects). The situation in rural Mozambique became so serious that several local leaders were lynched (burning tires around their necks). A local friend escorted me out of the village on our motorcycles just a few hours before a group of people had intended the same for me…these situations are rare, but they do happen. Thankfully, before I arrived in my research sites, I had read about the long history of rumors tied to health and development interventions and to the legacy of colonial upheaval of local lives in this specific region. These readings informed my contingency planning and communications with local support offices and the local hospital staff during the epidemic. These connections were helpful for keeping communication open and finding different ways to bridge the mistrust between local residents and health workers who were also being attacked in other areas. I also have some reflections on the social connections of drivers in rural areas and other field notes in an article in Area (2013). Area has some really interesting articles on fieldwork, power and transforming our practices. I especially recommend work by Martina Caretta and her colleagues https://martinaangelacarettaphd.com/publications/) and Sofia Zaragocin (see her on Twitter here and check out her Google Scholar profile: https://twitter.com/sofiazaragocin?lang=en). 


andrea nightingale photo

Andrea

During my PhD work in rural Nepal I was ill about 50% of the time with colds, flu and stomach problems. It radically curtailed my energy for the fieldwork I had planned. I coped with the situation by hiring some young students in the village to conduct a survey for me. Then I did not have to run around to every house. My ex-husband was with me and he led the forest vegetation survey. I tried to ensure I participated in 10% of the plots, but I would have had to abandon that part of the work if he had not been there. 

I also regularly face dangers with transportation. Road travel in Nepal is very dangerous so a huge part of our fieldwork budget is travel. We walk, use private jeeps, planes and helicopters. Some times of the year we cannot travel to our fieldsites because the risks are too great. When I was younger, I used to walk alone for 2 days into my field site. That now seems suicidal. Even if you don’t need a local assistant, hire one anyway for companionship and to avoid travelling alone. If you do not have funds to pay someone, you can often find a Masters student who is keen to get some training and experience. Treat it as an exchange. Offer to help them with their English, etc. 

My recent work has been on conflict and political transition. This has required constant adjustment. We have struggled with how to ask the right kinds of questions that do not change every time the political situation shifted (which it did between each of our field work periods). We had to change field locations several times due to the security situation. It was important that we theorised carefully what we were interested in so that the change in the empirical situation actually provided data for those questions rather than making us feel we were doing the wrong kind of project. For example, initially we asked what people thought ‘new Nepal’ was, but when the hope and possibilities of the revolution very quickly wore off, we had to rethink what we thought was important about political change. When we began framing our questions around the relationships between authority and political subjectivities, then the shifts from ‘new Nepal’ to ‘corrupt Nepal’ helped us to better understand that relationship.


Rebecca Elmhirst photo

Becky

It feels like a lifetime ago but I was doing PhD research in a difficult-to-reach rural area of Lampung, Indonesia. Roads were poor and I was reliant on public transport. On the way back to the field after a break with friends I was badly injured in a road accident. I had made various arrangements through my risk assessment about what would happen in that eventuality and was really glad to have done that – it meant I had a clear plan in place that just meant making some calls. A good local support network is vital. Even as I was lying in hospital, my main worry was my data (or lack of it). Looking back, that seems very upside down, but I’m sure this is quite common. I was even thinking about how a plaster cast would hold up in the rainy season! It was clear that I was going to have to completely change my research design and approach. The abrupt change to my plans were unsettling but it also meant I dug into some secondary data that I hadn’t even considered before, and ironically, this began my journey into political ecology when I saw the disconnect between peoples’ experiences and the development planning documents, not to mention highhanded statements in policy documentation and iterations from the powerful in newsmedia discourses. This became a major part of my study, and the limited fieldwork I had done could be woven into a new pattern of understanding. Time alone knitting (I found it hard to concentrate on academic articles for a while) actually became deep thought time and gave me tools for reflexive theory building afterwards, some of which I’ve tried to hold onto over the years. 


Panagiota

Doing research in rural Mekong Delta, Vietnam for my PhD proved more challenging than I thought it would be. I had to submit a complete research plan (who to interview with what questions) to the Vietnamese authorities, before I even entered the field. The extreme bureaucracy and state control of any communications with researchers (and especially foreigners) forced me to put together very rigid research plans. Despite the obvious limitations of this (not allowing a more open project together with local organizations and networks), it helped me break down my work in phases (having to ask for new permissions every 3 months) and re-evaluate while planning each phase what is it I know and what I still need to find out in order to answer as best as possible my research questions. Think of disruptions in your research as breaks to evaluate this. 


Sergio

I did fieldwork in Spain for my PhD, so no imminent particular ‘risks’, but maybe for that reason, lots of inefficiencies. I drove around the region of Aragon for several weeks interviewing people from 50 different villages. Each new piece of information raised new questions and questioned previous assumptions. Instead of going with it and focus on the story I wanted to tell, and tried to fill gaps as they emerged and that was endless. I never used 100% of the data I collected. In Northern Mexico, Yaqui community, it was the opposite situation. It was a bad time for me to be there for a number of reasons (conflicts with the government) so I had to revise my data collection plans. The traditional authorities would talk to me 1 out of every 3 appointments (I guess they wanted to test on which side I was) and I had a very short window of time to interview community members (always with “Pancho” the local escort I was assigned). No chance of ethnographic work. This forced me to be very efficient in the questions I wanted to ask. In the end I mostly filled gaps of understanding to have a good storyline. I filled details, explored alternative hypotheses and dressed the story line later, with secondary data and previous studies. The paper was not perfect but good enough. A good (published!) start. 


Giovanna

In my own environmental justice work, I am always forced (called in/called out) to face my own research practices as a privileged white woman working together with marginalized communities of color.  I have been profoundly influenced by my own mentor, Donna Haraway, in terms of how we engage with particular languages, knowledges, theories, stories.  As Donna puts it, “It matters what stories tell stories; it matters whose stories tell stories.” 

Resilient leadership in times of crisis

Field Notes —

What ‘resilient leadership in times of crisis’ means

Our communities can lead, but their challenges are critical

Island and coastal communities, and the people who care about them near and far, must pull together right now.

Tourism and lobstering, our key economic drivers, are in peril. The islands and coast rely on an annual influx of $4 billion in tourism revenue, earned primarily between June and September. If the pandemic runs its course through October, as some models predict, the financial stability of many families will evaporate.

For the $1 billion lobster industry, national markets and key export countries are struggling, so demand has evaporated. The pandemic has driven lobster prices through the floor, below $3 per pound at the boat. At that price, it doesn’t make sense for fishermen to take their boat off its mooring.

In the midst of this turmoil, North Haven island has garnered national and international press attention by the decision of its board of selectmen to ban non-residents from coming to the island.

One reaction to North Haven’s move is sympathy, with some seeing it as consistent with nations closing borders and enforcing social distancing measures. And so it is not surprising the island community would implement its own measures to accomplish what others are trying to do on an international scale.

But community is experienced personally and specifically, not in the abstractions of pandemic and international politics. At a personal level, North Haven’s decision has amplified concerns among a large number of people who consider Maine home, but are not residents. For seasonal residents who thought they were neighbors and friends, the move to close off the island may seem like distrust and animosity, and could have a long-term detrimental impact on the community’s social fabric. Many who care about the Maine coast, but live elsewhere, are asking if they are still considered a part of the communities they love.

Many of the educational, social, and cultural institutions in island and coastal communities exist because of a partnership between residents who lead local initiatives and the generosity of seasonal residents. Decisions that amplify the “from here, from away” divide undermine the social fabric that has allowed Maine’s island and coastal communities to become guiding lights nationally and internationally for how to live sustainably.

There are good reasons why Maine coastal communities are struggling with responding to those who might come to Maine to wait out the pandemic. Maine’s island communities are at great risk during this pandemic because of the age of their populations. Maine’s island communities have a median age of 48; Maine’s median age is 44.6, making it the nation’s oldest; and the U.S. has a median age of 37.9.

The islands are vulnerable, since the virus has a disproportionate impact on seniors. These are communities of between 50 and 1,200 people with little or no capacity to deal with medical emergencies.

In this context, the concerns expressed by North Haven municipal leaders are understandable, but the message still hurts.

All across Maine, small isolated communities are struggling with how to care for people. When we look to the islands more broadly, we find a more educational and conversational tone during this stressful time. It can be summarized as follows:

Please consider the risk you would expose our community to by coming here. Our community has an aging population that is already difficult to care for, and our resources are stretched. We don’t have the ability to help care for you if you get sick. You will have to go to the mainland. It would be a great help to us if you stayed where you are right now. We appreciate you, and we look forward to seeing you when the pandemic passes.

A robust series of conversations are taking place across the coast as the pandemic worsens. The Island Institute is helping to facilitate these discussions.

Resilient leadership in times of crisis requires generosity and caring, networking, asking for and offering support, and staying informed. Leadership also requires recognizing that island and coastal communities exist in reciprocal relationships with each other. The long-term relationships between island and coastal residents—and those who care about the Maine coast more broadly—are of critical concern, because this will not be the last crisis Maine’s island and coastal communities face.

It is important that we pull together, rather than create divides. Our actions today will speak volumes on how we interact with each other the next time we need the care and support of our neighbors.


Additional information and resources

State reacts to coronavirus challenges with emergency legislation

Island Institute coronavirus resource page


* Island Institute is a partner institute in the WEGO-ITN consortium