Coronavirus, Chickens, and Comics

by: Susan M. Squier

We started our Coronavirus lockdown on March 7, 2020.  That was the day I cleaned my henhouse, too.  I had decided it was too smelly in there for the chickens, which is why they were no longer laying inside.  Over an hour of shoveling, I cleared out a mountain of chicken poop (throwing out my back in the process).

I know these things now because since the previous November, I had been keeping a Daily Diary.  I’ve been working in the field of Graphic Medicine for a decade, and I had wanted for a while to try out a drawing practice modeled by cartoonist Lynda Barry in her brilliant book Making Comics (2019): Get a standard Composition Notebook (with that cow-mottled black and white cover). Write down what you DID and SAW on the left-hand page, and list seven things in each category.  Then on the right-hand page of the composition book, draw what you did, and below your drawing write about it in the present tense.

The point is the process, Barry explains.  “Your Daily Diary assignment will give you a way of paying attention to the world that is critical to making comics.  You will start to notice things to include and to begin to eavesdrop on conversations or hear things people say that you want to write down.”(Barry 2019, 84) Even before the Coronavirus, my experience tallied pretty well with what Barry predicted. But once I went on coronavirus lockdown, although I didn’t have many chances to eavesdrop and I definitely suffered from the Covid brain fog so many were now experiencing, I found that this drawing practice helped me remember more of what I did that day. And as I remembered what I did, I examined it more carefully and started to see more deeply into my surroundings.

Here’s the drawing on the diary page for Saturday March 7, 2020:

And here is my what I wrote below it:

We are at home—semicoronavirus self-isolation—and I discover that the chickens aren’t laying inside much anymore.  Three grimy white eggs are tucked into the tall dead weeds near the beehives.  So, I get on my high boots, and my EJI hat, and go out to clean the hen house.  No mask, because there may be more important reasons to put it on LATER.  The hen house has absolute mountains of poop.  I shovel them out into a rubber pan and carry them out to the hen-yard compost pile. Owwww! Not great for my back!

By Monday March 9, the Coronavirus had become widespread. Because we are both in our seventies, members of the high-risk group, my husband and I were hunkered down at home. It was a cold spring in Pennsylvania.

On March 11, I recorded in my diary that my son (a medical student in St.Louis) had taken his fiancée (also a medical student) to the ER for a sore throat.  The next, day, I recorded that my son: he “had a slight fever, which is scary.”

On Monday March 16, my drawing was headed “Day 1 of the Quarantine. Trump says it could go til July or August but with “resets” at 14 day intervals.”

I drew family faces, seen on zoom calls. I reminded myself that the point of the drawing (as Lynda Barry says) is the process.

Spring crept along.  On March 23, it was still rainy and snowy. I suddenly decided to order day-old chicks from Murray McMurray: 10 Columbian Wyandotte Chicks and a 15-chick assortment of Brown egg layers.  The woman at Murray McMurray told me they were selling fast.  I guess I wasn’t the only one with that impulse.

On April 15, the day the chicks were due to arrive, it was sunny but cold; there was hoarfrost on both fence posts and ice in the water buckets in the morning.  We got a space ready for the chicks in garage, after going to Tractor Supply to buy a heat lamp (by curbside delivery). And waited. We called the Post Office again and they said they should have come in by Express Mail at 1:30. But no sign of them.

On April 16 we were still waiting.  My “Did” and “Saw” lists for that day sound more like a poem to me.

Thursday April 16, 2020

DID Saw
1. Woke up & waited for chicks. 1. Saw a robin pulling out grubs from lawn as I waited for chicks.
2. Ate breakfast & waited for chicks. 2. Saw sun and clouds come and go & waited for chicks.
3. Drew & waited for chicks. 3. Saw fly on the outside of my study window & waited for chicks.
4. Did dishes & waited for chicks. 4. Saw that Gowen [my husband] had fed the hens as I waited for the chicks.
5. Talked to Virginia & waited for chicks. 5. Saw a violet in the cold grass as I waited for chicks.
6. Watched Gowen getting logs for a fire as I waited for the chicks. 6. Saw that there were no eggs in the nest boxes as I waited for the chicks.
7. Timed the ABC song for washing my hands and realized I need to add “Chocolate” at the end of it to get 20 seconds while waiting for chicks. 7. Saw the plastic bags from Tait Farms greenhouse on the hook as I waited for the chicks.

My Daily Drawing: “Snowy Sad Thursday as I wait for the chicks.”

And I wrote beneath it:

Saw it snow as I waited for the chicks.  Light, hard, almost popcorny flakes. Dropping heavily.  Almost torpedo-like, against a backdrop of lighter, sideways-blowing flakes.  Bouncing softly off the bushes in front of my study window.  Sifting down like a digital rain across the meadow. Clicking down, paced and steadily, almost Brownian motion, twirling, reversing, popping up, sideways, and down, spinning and shaking down and down, a pinpoint white pattern across the green lawn and the green and tawny meadow, a fast and foggy interference between me at my desk and the big fir beyond my meadow as I wait for the chicks. 9:52 a.m.

We had to wait four long, cold days for the chicks to arrive at our post office, because Express Mail was delayed due to Covid.  When I finally picked them up from our village post office, three of the chicks were dead of the cold; they’d been shipped from Iowa through Minneapolis to Pittsburgh, and then trucked to our small village.

The good news was that twenty-three seemed likely to survive. It was now so cold out that we put the others in our dining room. We found a 3’ x  6’ cardboard shipping container in the garage, equipped it with aluminum foil extensions to keep the chicks from hopping out, and placed it on our dining room table, with two heat-lamps duct taped to the chandelier above it.  We settled our surviving chicks, now five days old, on the Editorial Page of the New York Times, and dipped their beaks into the nutrient enhanced water as instructed by Murray McMurray

I wrote this as my Daily Diary for April 17:

Chicks, I am discovering, are hard to draw.  Their beaks start up on their head between their eyes and are pretty small, and the proportion of head to body is also hard to get.  But what is amazing—and I really don’t want to jinx this even by writing it—is how they seem on the verge of ‘crumping’ –as med students would say—and then recover.  Their energy and curiosity are stunning.

This morning, my husband said that the uncertainty was really getting to him. I reminded him of what our daughter said to us: “We were always in free fall.  We just didn’t know it.”

CODA:

It is Wednesday, August 5.  There’s no end in sight for the Coronavirus in the USA.  But for the last several weeks, my husband has been building a hen house.  When it’s finished, we plan to move our old hens into it and devote the larger hen house to the younger Coronavirus Quarantine hens.   With eighteen hens and one rooster, we’re hoping to become chicken self-sufficient for the future.

 

Susan Merrill Squier is Brill Professor Emeritus of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and English at Penn State University. Her most recent publication is PathoGraphics: Narrative, Aesthetics, Contention, Community, edited with Irmela Krüger-Fürhoff. (Penn State Press 2020). Her other publications include Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (Duke 2017), Graphic Medicine Manifesto (Penn State Press 2015) (with MK Czerwiec et. al.), Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (Rutgers 2011), Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Duke 2004), and Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (Rutgers 1984). She has been scholar in residence at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (2015), the Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung, Berlin (2014), The Bellagio Study and Conference Center (2001), Visiting Distinguished Fellow, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, Melbourne, Australia.  She is Advisory Board Member of SymbioticA Biological Arts (Perth) and of SLSA.  She is a section editor of Reproductive BioMedicine and Society, and a member of the editorial boards of Configurations, Literature and Medicine, Journal of the Medical Humanities.  Her co-edited special issue of Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology on “Graphic Medicine” was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2014, and she is co-editor of the book series Graphic Medicine at Penn State University Press. She is part of the Graphic Medicine collective and she serves as co-organizer of the international series of annual conferences on comics and medicine.

Coronavirus: Impact on Agriculture Sector and Gender in India

by: Surabhi Mittal and Pranjali

A nationwide lockdown was imposed in India on 24 March 2020 to curtail the spread of COVID 19. Since then, the pandemic has affected everyone’s life, livelihood and lifestyle. This is seen across all the sections of the society, but the most vulnerable groups are small-scale farmers, livestock owners, daily wage earners, laborer’s and their families, whose sources of earnings are squeezed or disrupted because of the lockdown.

Agriculture

Kudumbashree’s (Kerala) community-based action at the local level.

Markets for agriculture produce are severely affected due to lack of domestic demand and logistic problems. Directives were given by government to ensure timely harvesting and also procurement of grains, even during the lockdown phase. It helped safeguard the crop sector, but the situation was not the same for farmers growing perishable commodities like fruits and vegetables, who faced the issue of reduced demand and high wastage. Dairy cooperatives helped in stabilizing the milk prices, by increased production, but smaller cattle owners in villages had issues of reduced demand and also poor access to livestock feed and fodder. Poor logistic support led to wastage in the fish sector to a tune of 700,000 tons [1]. The poultry sector was worst impacted because of the myth linking the coronavirus with the livestock.

Migrant Laborers

India observed a trend of reverse migration which is defined as the process of going back to the place of origin. India has about 450 million internal migrant workers and studies have claimed that 400 million workers might fall in the trap of poverty, due to the present crisis. This form of migration is expected to put pressure on agricultural wages and lead to further underemployment and low wages in agriculture. This group has faced the issues of persistent hunger and food insecurity for a long period of time. They were impacted on all the parameters of the definition of food security- availability, accessibility, utilization and adequacy.

This unforeseen scenario calls for a change in outlook and approach towards the research that is ongoing in the field of agricultural economics and thus there are some new or improvised areas where future research can focus.

  1. Agricultural mechanization was being promoted because of lack of labor during the crop sowing and harvesting times. Some other states might further see labor shortages, while others will have a surplus due to reverse migration. Thus, strategy has to be rethought to balance enhanced productivity and employment opportunities.
  2. Several social welfare programs like the public distribution system and the national rural employment guarantee programs that were already ongoing in India now seem more relevant, and it is important to understand how these programs can be strengthened to ensure employment and food security even to the urban poor.
  3. Digital and financial inclusion programs were initiated on a large scale, and this helped in successfully enabling the government to provide direct cash transfers to ‘Jan Dhan’ account holders. People who were left out should now be motivated to become a part of this revolution.
  4. The government of India introduced ENAM (electronic national agriculture market) to provide an electronic trading platform for farmers and plans to connect all markets by 2022. This initiative now needs to be fast tracked.
  5. During the lockdown phase, provisions were introduced to promote direct selling and procurement of agricultural goods by relaxing the Agricultural Produce market commission norms. Thus, the impact and roll out of new policy reforms need to be closely monitored.

Before the crisis, the share of online retailing was less than 1% but now exponential growth has been observed in this sector [2]. Direct purchase access from farmers, organized retailing, frozen meat products, organics food is going to be the future. Policies are being put in place, but now, firm plans to implement such changes have to be ensured with the help of public private partnerships and investments in logistics, infrastructure, awareness, and branding.

But there is a gendered impact of this pandemic too

Women laborer in tea garden in Assam after work resumed during the lockdown.

It is a known fact that emergencies, crisis, and shocks have unequal effect on gender and also men and women behave differently in such situations. Women are an important part of the farming community and thus the impacts of the changed situation, policies, and processes on them are yet to be understood. Their employability, access to markets and resources, food and nutrition are going to be effected and this will be a big future challenge.

Besides being economically vulnerable and having poor access to resources as compared to men, culturally and socially women find themselves more exploited in the situation of COVID 19 lockdown. Higher incidences of domestic violence have been reported globally and this is likely to be higher in poorer and distressed sections of the society. In the case of layoffs and wage cuts, it is a known-unspoken fact that the actions would be biased against the women. Several news articles have linked reverse migration with increasing exploitation of women, especially in low income / rural areas. Increasing unemployment amongst women will affect their authority and decision-making power and thus reversing the path of women empowerment. There is a social norm of women eating after feeding her family. In case of a food shortage women have to eat what is left over which might be less in quantity or left out from previous meals and thus might be spoilt and  nutrient deficient. With increased unemployment, and food insecurity it is most likely that the female members would have reduced the quantity of their food intake and thus suffer from higher levels of malnutrition.

Children are one of the biggest victims of this pandemic; there is a profound impact on their wellbeing especially in marginal and socio-economically distressed communities. Closure of educational institutions has worsened the learning crisis and also access to food as part of the mid-day meals program of the government. Children dropping out of school will face numerous challenges such as child labor, child marriage, teenage pregnancies etc., which will affect their future irreversibly. Further, increasing nutritional deficiency and exposure to stress will act as obstacles in the path of childhood development.

Self-help groups, NGOs and even government agencies are playing important roles to ensure everyone gets food, but still nutrition will be hugely impacted. Skill development programs are being initiated to enable people to learn new skills that will help them combat the livelihood challenge that the pandemic has created. The networks of women’s self-help groups (SHGs) and Anganwadi workers (community health workers) have already and will have to further increase their role in creating awareness counselors for women facing domestic abuse. Women SHG’s have quickly embraced producing masks, sanitizers, and protective equipment for the health workers along with setting up the community kitchens, to ensure that homeless, unemployed people do not suffer due to starvation.

These are additional areas that need attention both by the policy makers and researchers, so that these efforts are not just short term but are taken up institutionally to ensure better preparedness in case of future emergencies.

Notes: 

[1] https://www.agroberichtenbuitenland.nl/actueel/nieuws/2020/05/12/covid-19-impact-on-indian-agriculture

[2] https://www.icrisat.org/containing-covid19-impacts-on-indian-agriculture/

Photos courtesy of:

Kudumbashree, https://idronline.org/covid-19-and-lessons-from-kerala/

https://scroll.in/article/960142/one-reason-why-tea-garden-employees-went-back-to-work-despite-covid-19-fears-hunger

 

Surabhi Mittal is a associated with various think tanks and research organizations as independence consultant and resource person. She is an agricultural economist and has rich experience of working on gender issues in India in context of technology adoption, information dissemination and empowerment. She is also the member secretary of International Committee of Women in Agricultural Economics (ICWAE- IAAE).

 

 

Pranjali has just completed her Masters degree in Economics and is exploring opportunities in research.

Reflections on COVID-19 and feminist methods continued

by: Ann R. Tickamyer

Unlike so many past deadly diseases of pandemic scope and scale, almost from the beginning, Covid-19 has visibly functioned as a giant sorting mechanism.  In the U.S. early reports highlighted that it separated the young from the old, women from men, the healthy from the at risk, those deemed in essential services from the rest of the workforce, the homed from the homeless, the urban from the rural, even the right from the left.  Most of all, but largely unsaid, it divides the privileged from the poor and marginalized.  Fundamental social cleavages are deeply implicated in who is most vulnerable, how it is spread, what are the consequences, and what recovery might look like.  And the usual suspects of gender, race, ethnicity, and class figure more prominently and urgently than ever.

Covid highlights the critical necessity of bringing an intersectional lens to any research, following the precepts of feminist theory and epistemology [1].  Although no surprise to gender researchers, for many observers it has been a wakeup call on the society’s dependence on and the precarity of women’s work in a deeply and systemically unequal gendered division of labor.  Whether paid or unpaid but too often invisible and devalued, women’s work features prominently both as providers and targets.  Women disproportionately work in the service industries where they are either deemed essential or are out of a job – healthcare workers and cleaners on the one hand, restaurant servers and retail workers on the other.  They are agricultural workers in an industry that remains stereotyped as male. At home they are the primary care takers with the normal heavy responsibilities multiplied during social isolation.  The vulnerabilities and burdens are magnified when race and class are added to the mix. Documenting these and the numerous other inequities of the pandemic is critical to better understanding the many differential impacts buried in the rhetoric of a ‘”pan”demic, that in principle affects everyone equally but actually varies widely. Yet in a cruel irony, it is harder than ever to accomplish this work.

The situation is deeply frustrating, all the more because it embodies a contradiction.  At a time when we need better, more, and more committed research into the intersectional gendered impacts of global disaster, it is next to impossible to conduct direct research on what is happening in the field.  The activities necessary to continue this research are in direct contravention to safety requirements, restrictions imposed by sponsoring institutions, and basic common sense.  It is impossible to travel, to interview, to observe, and document in person what is happening, and even if it were possible, it would defy fundamental ethical obligations to the participants of such study.  The more remote the location or the fewer the resources available to the community, the more important to understand and document the realities on the ground, the greater the barriers to doing so. The first obligation of any research is to do no harm, and in ordinary circumstances with reasonable precautions and observance of human subjects protocols, that is not an issue.  But in the case of a world-wide pandemic, any effort must be regarded as a potential harm to be avoided until safety can be assured for participants, researchers, and their respective communities. We need to hear diverse voices, perspectives, and experiences, and as researchers we need to facilitate their dissemination.  And right now, this is difficult if not impossible.

A case in point:  On March 1, I returned home to State College from a week spent in Dillingham Alaska, a scoping trip for collaborators on a large trans-disciplinary research project on the impacts of climate change in Arctic communities.  The spread of Corona virus in the U.S. was just becoming obvious and we were glad to get home, although its extent and impacts were only starting to be experienced.  A few short weeks later, we went into “lockdown” mode, sheltering in place “to flatten the curve” of its transmission.  As we practiced social isolation, many remote Alaskan villages practiced entire community isolation; others struggled with the consequences of lacking that control; both modes with implications for health, safety, and food security.

The trip to Alaska was to be the first of several to establish relations, trust, access, communication, and permission for future research on the complex connections between food security, migration, and climate change in the Arctic and its gendered practices and consequences.  Access was already a high hurdle, now it is deferred with no clear path to when and how it can be established. As the lone gender researcher on the project, this is particularly distressing given how few studies have used a gendered lens.

Research around the world repeats this scenario.  In some places pre-established relationships and ongoing data collection by local researchers continues either directly or virtually, but in many cases it has been suspended or radically transformed.  Where possible, phone, video, and mail have substituted for field research, but often with deep compromise in the nature and quality of the data amid many limits to the reach of virtual communication methods.  Even in the U.S. large segments of rural populations have little access to broadband and wireless communications. Worldwide, the more marginalized the group, the more likely this is the case.  The greater the gender inequality, the less likely women will have access or permission to participate even if there is community or household access. Many reports from around the world suggest an increase in family violence from the isolation measures advocated for virus protection, requiring great ingenuity to ascertain but little recourse except measures to keep research from exacerbating the situation. 

So what is to be done? There are few easy answers.  In a previous piece I said it is time for “serious rethinking of our entire enterprise” with better attention to how well feminist ideals in research are put into practice with the example of participatory approaches moving beyond advocacy to actuality.  Hypothetically, this can enable easier continuation of research even where outside researchers lose access.  It is not a solution but moves in the right direction. Similarly, taking every opportunity to highlight inequalities with research designed to uncover power dynamics and differentials to advocate for women’s empowerment and gender transformation in agriculture, food production, and beyond.  This may be particularly apropos at a time when the realities of pandemic vulnerabilities and inequities have intersected with those occasioned by the pain and violence of police brutality, institutional and individual racism, and growing inability to hide from the realities of the cruelties and oppression experienced by persons of color on the one hand and various forms of white privilege on the other.  Protest has spread from the U.S. to become a global movement.  Many pundits have speculated on what life will look like if and when we emerge on the other side of these now intertwined disasters. It is incumbent on feminist researchers to be prepared to study, participate, and help shape the new realityAnn Tickamyer is Professor Emerita of Rural Sociology and Demography at Penn State University. Her scholarship over the last 40+ years examines rural poverty, policy, and livelihoods; gender and development; gender, disaster, and climate change; and research methods in the U.S., Southeast Asia, and beyond.

Notes:

[1] See Tickamyer and Sexsmith 2019 and Tickamyer 2020 for descriptions and discussions of feminist methodology.

 

Ann Tickamyer is Professor Emerita of Rural Sociology and Demography at Penn State University. Her scholarship over the last 40+ years examines rural poverty, policy, and livelihoods; gender and development; gender, disaster, and climate change; and research methods in the U.S., Southeast Asia, and beyond.

 

 

Covid-19, gender, agriculture, and future research

by: Hannah Budge and Sally Shortall

Coronavirus has undoubtedly impacted our global society in many unprecedented ways, affecting those from all walks of life. When we were asked to write this piece on what the consequences were for women in the agriculture industry, we decided it would be best to hear it from those who are involved in the sector itself. A focus group was conducted with a group of women from a range of backgrounds who are connected to agriculture in various ways. From the rich data it generated two themes which will be the focus of this blog post: the reversion to traditional gender roles in the family and gendered responsibilities around mental well-being. These will be both subsequently discussed followed by our reflections for future research.

Traditional gender roles in the family

All participants spoke of their frustrations of the immediate reversion to traditional gender roles in the household when lockdown began. For instance, the assumption that despite other household members being home, it continuously fell to the woman to carry out the domestic tasks, such as cooking and cleaning. One participant commented that she felt there had been a regression in her stance as a woman, and that effectively all the progression which had occurred throughout her lifetime was being taken away. This was due to being constantly expected to not just manage a farm, but to then take on the total management of the home with little help from partners and other household members. For instance, another commented that:

I was the responsible functioning adult that had to cook and do the shopping and lamb ewes and calve cows… And they’re like looking at me waiting to be fed.

This has led to extra pressure being put on women, to balance their work and catering for their households needs. For those who have children this includes the extra burden of home schooling and childcare. There has been a wealth of reports regarding this issue, how throughout COVID-19 it has consistently been the women in the parenting partnership that has been expected to take on the role of teacher, or at least the organisation of when the children are going to do their homework. This was reflected in the focus group research, where participants felt that they were again expected to take on much of this role, rather than their partner.

Interestingly, one participant whose other household members were farmers that were also female commented when asked about mealtimes:

Sometimes I will do it, sometimes it might be my Mum she might make it the night before. But it definitely wouldn’t be Joan or Lori who is working on the farm.

It is interesting that here, where the non-farming household members are women, the women farmers are not expected to cook, which is different to the previous participant’s situation. It underlines the gendered nature of expectations around domestic duties.

Gendered responsibilities around mental well-being

The participants also spoke about their different mental health responsibilities related to COVID-19. One woman spoke of the concerns of others that she had spoken to regarding their concern for a male family member and their mental wellbeing during this time, looking for ways on how they could help them. It is interesting that women are assuming this responsibility. Additionally, others spoke of how women had felt they were responsible for the:

cooking, shopping, meds for elderly family, keeping the kids going, women are feeling that they’re the ones responsible for keeping everything going and keeping everyone happy. Umm and that’s a lot of pressure.  

This was echoed throughout the focus group members, with participants commenting that although some had not previously been around the household as much due to work commitments that involved travelling it had still reverted back to them being expected to fix everything and manage it all. Furthermore, the invisible mental work of constantly having to make decisions for the family:

Mentally, my biggest issue has been headspace and it’s going to sound, and I don’t mean to sound kind of poor me, the cooking I don’t mind but the having to make a decision every single day for what we are eating, what we are buying at the shops, what time the kids are getting out of bed, what we do during the day is overwhelming, on top of work.

Much of this mental labour is invisible. These are responsibilities that women largely do unspoken, in their head. Covid-19 has increased the amount of this labour. As mentioned, the concern of the emotional well-being of others in the household has fallen again the women in the household, one participant said:

So yeah, so they are needing a hell of a lot of emotional support just now, and unsurprisingly that falls to me.

It is interesting that she thinks it is ‘unsurprising’ it falls to her. She has a much more senior, prestigious, and well-paid job than her husband. But what is evident from her case, and from all of the participants in the focus group is that unpaid domestic labour responsibilities are not more equally shared and when these increase with Covid-19, they fall to women.

Future research

We have tended to focus on how women secure entry to a masculine profession and how they are treated once they become farmers. In future we will not just look at women’s success in the industry as a measure of equality, we will also pay closer attention to the division of responsibilities within the home unit. Who has responsibility for what? We will also be mindful of the hidden mental domestic responsibilities, who organises the day and who writes the grocery list are chores that often go unnoticed. The most equal situation in the focus group was the farm where there are multiple women, some of whom do not work on the farm. We will question going forward whether, in agriculture, same sex relationships and same sex households have a fairer distribution of domestic labour and tasks.

 

 Hannah Budge is an ESRC funded PhD researcher at the Centre of Rural Economy, Newcastle University, UK. Her thesis will examine the role of women in agriculture in the Scottish Islands, looking at the barriers in this industry experienced between and within these communities. She is interested in how gender impacts on everyday life in rural areas.


Professor Sally Shortall is the Duke of Northumberland Chair of Rural Economy, Newcastle University in the UK, and an Honorary Professor in Queen’s University Belfast. She is interested in agriculture, farm families, and the role of women in agriculture. She has carried out research on women in agriculture for the FAO, the European Parliament, the European Commission and is currently advising the European Court of Auditors on gender mainstreaming the European Agricultural Fund.