Shifting Perspectives: Adapting research agendas to the opportunities of COVID-19

by: Elisabeth Garner

Three weeks before the stay-at-home orders began, I started a postdoc at Cornell University’s Department of Global Development. Starting a new position requires a shift in research agenda regardless. However, the pandemic and travel restrictions have created a whole new context. As a result, I have had to reflect on what COVID-19 means for gender and agriculture research broadly, and on how I can contribute to the field during this time.

Transnational feminists write diligently about cross-border engagement, recognizing the ways that history, economics, and systems of power are experienced through race, gender, class, sexualities, etc. The pandemic is shifting and highlighting these dynamics within and between borders, and COVID-19 makes crossing borders more dangerous. For those who are not crossing borders physically, critical reflection of international collaborations and the resulting power dynamics remains important as our absence creates new opportunities to engage with partners who continue working in our absence.

In my own privilege, I continue working from home in New York. Based in Ithaca, I mainly work with three projects: GREAT Agriculture, which provides sub-Saharan African researchers with gender training based at Makerere University, Uganda; the NextGen Cassava project focused on genetic improvements in cassava with most activities in Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda; and, the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement (ILCI), which will support four Centers of Innovation led by National Agricultural Research Institutes (NARIs) based in the Global South to develop breeding tools for staple crops.

However, working during a pandemic has challenges. I developed a survey to capture the experience of my new academic co-workers, who are faculty, researchers, administrators, and project managers. The survey revealed a decrease in feeling valued, as well as an increased concern of losing their job. Women reported working more hours, yet greater decreases in their sense of accomplishment. While both men and women enjoyed being at home with loved ones, women especially reported the impossibility of succeeding at their jobs without childcare. This is consistent with reports that women are publishing at lower rates than men while working from home. We should be alarmed at the gender and agriculture scholarship and scholars we are losing during this pandemic, and identify ways to support each other.

The survey also revealed that my coworkers and I miss informal interactions. I started my job in anticipation of the NextGen Cassava annual meeting in Nigeria, which brings together researchers and project partners from across Africa, Europe, South America, and the U.S. to share their work in person. The cancelation of meetings like this and its unstructured conversations means a loss in community building and learning together. These informal spaces are particularly important for gender researchers who work across borders and disciplines to shift cultures and attitudes about the importance of gender and inclusion. Meinzen-Dick (2020) writes that the physical distancing of COVID-19 poses challenges to collective action around natural resource management, but that ICTs have the potential to support “social solidarity”. When reflecting on us as researchers, despite the many zoom meetings, we are also lacking opportunities to shape culture change.

Despite not being together physically, our team is still building capacity in gender research. Part of this work will support ILCI awardees. While donors require consideration of gender and other cross-cutting themes, NARIs may lack the staff, resources, or possibly desire to address them substantially. While in-person gender integration and capacity trainings are postponed, our team is pivoting online. Online trainings will be limited to sensitization, recognizing that deeper skills and engagement with gender require in-person interaction. In addition, we are planning a review of existing capacities through online interviews and surveys. We are also seeking secondary data, again considering research pathways that do not require in-person contact.

In addition to building organizational capacity, our team supports graduate students and professionals in gender focused research projects. As I am in one of the few countries with increasing COVID cases, this intensifies the need for reflexivity in addition to the power dynamics and privilege that already complicate crossing borders to collect data. Instead, I can focus on supporting team members already in the countries of research. This role may not be valued by funders typically and is difficult to capture in project indicators. However, the restrictions of COVID-19 make this an essential part of project continuity. With GREAT, I am engaged with researchers at different stages with the goals of publication and affirmation of their work on gender.

This pause in data collection also allows us to reflect on a larger question: Do we need to collect more data? Often, large-scale, intensive surveys are never analyzed fully, and often lack thorough gender analysis. This leaves a lot of opportunity to look at existing data sets and still develop novel understandings. Depending on the data, this could also provide a foundation for future research that examines the impacts of COVID-19 on agriculture and the environment. As part of my work on NextGen Cassava, we have several projects using previously collected data. Several of these projects are from previous graduate students either based in or originally from the African countries where this project takes place. The aim is to further highlight their work and help them in publication.

As Dr. Carter mentions in her post, this time for self-reflection comes amidst an intensified national call to address systemic racism, and as COVID reinforces a look at local resources and systems of power. Further, important research capturing the experiences of men and women in response to COVID-19 has continued, including rapid assessments by CARE and UN Women documenting divisions of care and gender-based violence. However, we could be missing critical gendered insights of agrifood systems, such as those of Drs. Kawarazuka and Huong on market vendors in Vietnam and by De Lovie of those sleeping in their market stalls in Uganda. So as I’m stuck at home, I’ll keep working to support and amplify those in the field while focusing on how our field can respond to the pandemic and this time of reflection.

Post was written and submitted in June 2020

Photo credit: www.nextgencassava.org

Elisabeth Garner is currently a postdoc at Cornell University’s Department of Global Development. PhD studies were at Penn State University in Rural Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She thanks Dr. Hale Ann Tufan for her leadership in the work discussed in this blog and for conversations that produced many of these ideas.

 

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