Photography and Participatory Methodology for CSA

Being in a foreign country with an unfamiliar language, customs, and social norms, one is hyper-sensitive to communication. Everything takes a bit more effort and there are lots of opportunities for misunderstandings and faux-pas - more unknown unknowns than you could shake a stick at. Given that I'm here primarily to do a thesis on participatory research and multi-directional communication in relation to climate-smart agriculture, I'm probably thinking about it more than I would otherwise be. Still, it seemed like the gods were winking last night as I tried to get myself some dinner in Hanoi.

Before leaving the hotel, I looked over my notebook and planned out my meal based on a couple of scribbled phrases related to food. Xin caw toi c'om rang (Can I have fried rice please?) looked like a good bet and I set off.

I took a wander around some streets before making my way to a place I had spotted earlier. Fairly ravenous by the time I got there, the phrase had gone out of my head. Still, as I got to the entrance I had it back, and ran it over in my mind. The older woman on the steps who was obviously in charge demanded something of me as I entered the open-fronted area and I proceeded to tell her that I would like some fried rice, please. She didn't seem convinced but pointed me to a table under a fluorescent bulb and a fan and repeated what I had said. I nodded. She shouted to a girl at the back. I sat down and looked around. Somehow, I wasn't sure I was in the right place. Momentarily, the girl appeared and repeated my 'fried rice' again as she left a small bowl of ice-cream in front of me. I smiled at her like it was exactly what I had expected, and it was delicious. But I was still hungry, and it wasn't what I had asked for. Or was it?

I guess the lesson is that communication can go astray, and when it comes to the needs of resource-poor agricultural communities in developing countries we need to be keenly aware that the onus is on development agencies to match any interventions to what communities are actually asking for. Ice-cream may not do, no matter how good it tastes.

 

"Sea ice age is a proxy for ice thickness, with older ice generally meaning thicker ice. Though ice can pile up into rubble fields when the motion of the ice pushes up against the coast or thicker ice, level ice generally increases in thickness as it ages through more winter freeze cycles. Thus, ice age is a reasonable indicator of the sea ice thickness.

At the end of March, ice age data show only a small remaining coverage of old (5+ years) ice. Since 2011, the oldest ice has comprised less than 5 percent of the total ice cover. During the mid-1980s, such ice made up nearly a third of the ice. [...] Most of the third year ice is between Fram Strait and the pole, which means it is likely to exit the Arctic Ocean during the coming months."

The above text is taken from the April report from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). Follow the link to read the full article.

Notwithstanding the irony of this being viewed from a plane, it was interesting to see the smoke rising from land-clearing fires during the last hour or 90 mins of the flight from Istanbul to Hanoi, particularly as we crossed Laos north of Luang Prabang. Burning has been an integral part of agriculture in this part of the world for a long time but increasing pressure to get more land into cultivation has seen huge amounts of carbon released into the atmosphere in recent years, most notably further south in Indonesia.

Read more here.

"Our fixation with, and indeed our very definition of expertise will have to bend to accommodate other ways of knowing. In this paradigm, research and development are not isolated from real-world practices; they work alongside communities to improve scholarship and community well-being for us all." - Freya Yost

The above quote is from a recent article by Freya Yost spanning knowledge, communication, participatory methods, and agroecology.