Month: October 2020

by: Sara Hendery and Daniel Sumner

While the COVID-19 pandemic is slowing down in some areas of the world, its impact on food security could have long-term effects on millions of people, particularly women and marginalized communities. If pest and disease incidence is left unmanaged in farmers’ fields due to limited access to resources, yields have the potential to dramatically decrease. Social distancing, disrupted markets, and labor shortages are just a few of the barriers keeping people from buying, selling, and consuming the food they need.

In Africa and Asia, where the U.S. Agency for International Development-funded Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Integrated Pest Management (IPM IL) works to improve farmer livelihoods and increase food security, the program’s collaborative researchers and farmers have been uniquely impacted by the onset of COVID-19. As farmers attempt to grow crops without the trusted resources they typically rely on, researchers addressing food security issues are facing their own constraints gathering data, rescheduling delayed activities, and managing ever-changing workspaces.

As COVID-19 increasingly highlights the fragility of global food supply, the IPM IL aims to address gaps along the way. Below are snapshots of the experiences of farmers and researchers collaborating with the IPM IL amid the pandemic – their obstacles, insights, lessons learned, and pathways to progress.

Kenya

For the IPM IL, the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) does the critical work of setting up on-farm trials of IPM solutions to crop problems. These trials help to validate the efficacy of products like Trichoderma, a naturally occurring fungus that helps boost plant defense mechanisms against threats. Due to the pandemic, however, trials have been put on hold.

Jesca Mbaka, a plant pathologist at KALRO, said that setbacks like these may have an especially negative impact on women.

“Women are likely to be marginalized due to their low bargaining power,” Mbaka said. “Demand for non-essential goods like crafts and clothing, among other commodities dominating the informal sector, is currently low. Small food kiosks that are significantly run by women have been driven out of business due to recommended social distancing rules.”

Additionally, both schools and childcare facilities have closed in Kenya due to COVID-19, shifting the childcare burden to households, and more specifically to women.

Mbaka also said that as she, too, attempts to manage COVID-19 restrictions while coordinating for several development projects, she is experiencing a social shift.

“It [working in the field] is not readily acceptable to my family members, despite the fact that I am the sole bread winner,” she said. “My family is thinking of my vulnerability.”

To continue providing resources during the pandemic, the KALRO team is utilizing WhatsApp groups – where images, videos, and details of pests and diseases can be shared – that include project collaborators, extension agents, and lead farmers. The virtual groups help maintain connections between the field and the lab and foster the real-time agricultural assistance necessary for addressing emerging threats.

“There is no choice but to get aligned to mass adoption of technology in agricultural research and extension,” Mbaka said. “There is opportunity to redefine how agriculture is supposed to be delivered in the 21^st Century. Adoption of agri-tech has the potential to revolutionize food production systems for prosperity and ensure adequate food production during and post COVID-19.”

Cambodia

Siem Reap

In Cambodia, the surge of unemployment due to COVID-19 has forced many farmer families to adapt to new realities.

Take, for example, La Koeurn and her husband Say Sovanna, who live in Siem Reap. Their five-member family was forced to rely solely on their home vegetable garden and half-hectare rice field for food and income when they both lost their jobs due to the pandemic. The family simultaneously observed a major shift in demand for vegetables as tourists in Siem Reap significantly dwindled. What vegetables used to earn the family $100 a month reduced to just $25-$50 a month.

In Chriev Commune, another area of Siem Reap, Chet Chenda and her husband Yun Yoeurn are facing similar issues. Chenda is a vegetable grower and Yoeurn is a receptionist at a hotel, together typically earning up to $270 a month. When Yoeurn lost his job at the height of the pandemic, the family also had to rely on income elicited from selling vegetables that were declining in value. This earned the couple $32-$50 a month, a significant decrease in earnings.

“There are several female farmers whose husbands work in Siem Reap city as motor taxi, construction workers, or at the hotel and restaurants,” said Kim Hian Seng, an IPM IL coordinator from iDE. “Most of the husbands are losing jobs during this pandemic and all schools in Cambodia have been closed since March until now. These women are now taking extra burdens to look after the children.”

The IPM IL team in Cambodia advised the two families and others like them to apply IPM practices to boost yields and income. Farmer families began using seedling trays, for example, instead of putting seeds directly in the soil, to ensure healthier crop growth. Planting seeds in trays also allows for easy application of coco-peat, a sterile medium that helps produce strong seedlings.

The farmers were also encouraged to grow different kinds of vegetables, like Chinese kale. The crop can grow bountifully even with inconsistent weather, and can be sold for $1.00-$1.50/kg compared to crops they usually grow for only $0.25-$0.5/kg.

“Families remain positive,” said Seng, “as they can spend more time with family and are committed to being commercial growers by learning more from the project, particularly on other high-value crops such as cauliflower, tomato, and cherry tomato.”

Phnom Penh

As economies dramatically change amid COVID-19, so does the way information is communicated, which inevitably impacts farmers’ abilities to manage crop problems. For example, the IPM IL’s collaborators at the International Rice Research Institute(IRRI) in Phnom Penh were not able to widely promote an interactive mobile tool called Cellcard 3-2-1 System. The free call-in service helps farmers diagnose pest problems and combat them by applying IPM solutions.

Rica Flor, an IRRI scientist, explained that despite this gap in promotion, a service like Cellcard addresses the urgent need for knowledge and information farmers are feeling right now. Excitingly, she has observed at least 300 farmers utilizing the tool – mostly learning about it through word of mouth – to access agricultural assistance during the pandemic.

“In terms of extension,” Flor said, “diversifying the pathways to reach farmers with knowledge – including those that require face-to-face interactions and those that do not such as mobile or internet-based options – can support projects in continuing to reach their target audiences.”

Flor also remarked that in Cambodia, the pandemic led to a rise in displaced workers, especially migrant workers in Thailand and women working in the garment industry, who returned to rural areas of the country.

“They are now landless and are thus marginalized in terms of agricultural assistance,” she said.

This dilemma highlights, Flor emphasized, the value of local food production. Due to the closure of borders, Cambodia’s small businesses may have an opportunity to purchase from growers in rural areas for the fruits, vegetables, and grains they typically receive from neighboring countries.

Nepal

One of the crucial tenets of the IPM IL’s newest project – Feed the Future Nepal Integrated Pest Management (FTFNIPM), implemented by iDE, Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC), and others – is inclusive transfer of IPM technologies. The pandemic, however, limited access to the spaces women typically rely on for information and income, such as collection centers and local markets where women sell vegetables.

Niki Maskey, a gender coordinator for the project, said that field technicians are working to meet the farmer demand for agricultural information by providing services through Community Business Facilitators (CBFs). CBFs are local farmer-entrepreneurs that help deliver supplies to rural farmers, including sustainable IPM solutions, such as pheromone traps. Maskey stated that this opportunity for access is especially important for women at this time.

“Small landholding farmers and marginalized communities in developing countries were already in crisis,” said Maskey. “Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic these barriers are likely to be huge and will continue to remain even after the situation improves…The barriers include decision-making opportunities for women farmers. Female farmers are unlikely to make decisions regarding their occupation. These decisions are most likely to be made by the male head of the family. Due to COVID-19, it might be difficult for the female farmers who once had the opportunity to make the [agricultural] decisions as the migrant male workers have returned to their home and are willing to be in charge of the activities/decisions in agricultural activities.”

Additionally, while IPM IL typically offers large in-person trainings on IPM solutions in Nepal communities, the program has now shifted to disseminating agricultural information to farmers by way of bulk text messages and over the radio. The messages include pest identification details, management methods, contact details for assistance, and more.

Also delayed by the pandemic was the program’s work on fall armyworm – which relies on introducing biocontrol of the pest – as well

as training on safe pesticide use. The IPM IL has thus shifted to virtual webinars to maintain information dissemination. Online trainings have focused on areas such as safe pesticide disposal and spraying methods and mass production of natural enemies to manage the fall armyworm, eliciting hundreds of participants including private sector professionals, NGOs, and government officials.

Bangladesh

Due to COVID-19, the experimental field plots set up by IPM IL collaborators at the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) were delayed. With crucial data on pests such as Tuta absoluta, the fall armyworm, and mango fruit fly delayed for collection, mitigating their spread will also be delayed.

Yousuf Mian, the IPM IL’s project coordinator in Bangladesh, said that while these activities are being delayed for the season, long-term impacts will be felt by smallholder farmers.

“Agricultural activities are based on season,” Mian said. “If you miss the sowing season of a crop, you also miss the harvesting season. That means you lose your income. Farmers could also have a field at harvesting stage [amid COVID-19], but are not able to harvest it because of labor shortage or because of the high wages of labor. All these things will seriously affect family well-being.”

Photo credits: Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Integrated Pest Management

 

Sara Hendery is the Communications Coordinator for the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Integrated Pest Management. Since 2018, she has been responsible for documenting the program’s activities around the world aimed at improving food security and farmer livelihoods in developing countries.

 

Daniel Sumner is the Assistant Director for the Women and Gender in International Development Program from Virginia Tech’s Center for International Research, Education, and Development. Since 2014, he has been supporting the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Integrated Pest Management’s network of researchers, scientists, and implementing partners to engage with the gendered dimensions of pest management and agricultural research for development.

by: Sovanneary Huot

COVID-19 in Cambodia

The COVID-19 pandemic is truly global. It severely threatens the health and economy of all countries – large and small, rich and poor. To date, Cambodia has had fewer reported COVID-19 cases than its neighbors. As of August 6, 2020 Cambodia had only 273 COVID-19 cases, while Vietnam had 964, and Thailand 3,378. Nonetheless, the pandemic has still had far-reaching impacts on the Cambodian society and economy. For instance, in the education sector, 13,482 schools have been temporarily suspended since March 16, 2020. The tourism sector has also been hit hard due to the travel restrictions. As of May 8, 2,956 tourism-based businesses were forced to temporarily close, which caused 45,405 staff members to be laid off. As of June, the hotels and guesthouses in the famous tourist site in Siem Reap province – home to very popular, impressive and beautiful ancient temples – have been devastated. COVID-19 forced 18 hotels and 96 guesthouses to close permanently, while 172 hotels and 99 guesthouses have been temporarily shuttered. Only 40 hotels and 66 guesthouses remain in service. The closure of hotels and guesthouses in Siem Reap alone resulted in around 8,000 newly unemployed workers.

Cambodia’s textile industry, which provides a total of about 850,000 jobs, of which 85% are occupied by women, has been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Around one-third of 600 garment factories have been closed, leaving tens of thousands of workers unemployed. The majority of workers and staff are struggling to survive. The agricultural sector – the focus of this blog post – has also been severely impacted. For example, only fragrant rice is allowed to be exported; other types of rice are only sold internally to ensure domestic supply. This unprecedented situation has put farmers in a painful condition by restricting markets for their products.

The Royal Government of Cambodia COVID-19 Response

The Royal Government of Cambodia offered an initial package of $1.16 billion to help mitigate the impacts of COVID-19. Some of this support was targeted to the health system to help it prepare for a potential surge in COVID-19 cases. For livelihood coping assistance, the government provides the stimulus package funds to 2.4 million poor and vulnerable households in the categories Poor One (the poorest) and Poor Two (the second poorest). The measures to boost the economy include reducing taxes on some businesses and agencies, restructuring loans for small and medium-sized enterprises, and providing investment capital at low interest rates to small businesses.

In helping the Cambodian government fight against this global health crisis, some countries and development partners including Australia, China, the European Union, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, The United States, and Vietnamhave provided some technical and financial support to address negative economic and social impacts. For instance, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) approved a $250 million loan to help the Government of Cambodia strengthen the country’s health system, implement social assistance to poor and vulnerable people, and provide economic stimulus to small and medium-sized enterprises. The French government provided a grant of $1.7 million to help the tourism sector recover and rebuild in a post-COVID-19 world.

The Impacts of COVID-19 on Smallholder Women Farmers

Although the number of cases in Cambodia is thankfully low to date, even the threat of COVID-19 has caused widespread suffering. Here I focus on smallholder farmers, especially women farmers, who have arguably suffered disproportionately. Smallholder farmers have commonly experienced some form of livelihood disruption and economic hardship. They find it difficult to sell their products. Basic forces of supply and demand have worked against them. Weak demand for their production forced farmers to sell their goods at lower prices, resulting in lost income and new challenges to continue in, much less expand, their farming enterprises.

To learn more about how women farmers have been affected by COVID-19, I  remotely interviewed farmers who were affiliated with the recently completed Women in Agriculture Network Project in Cambodia (WAgN-Cambodia). The WAgN Cambodia project was designed by Penn State and partners toempower women and improve the nutrition status of women and children in Cambodia. This project received support from the USAID-funded Sustainable Intensification Innovation Lab (SIIL) at Kansas State University.

The team was led by Penn State researcher Rick Bates (PI), David Ader (University of Tennessee) and other Penn State and Cambodian research partners. I was also part of this project, having studied women’s leadership within agricultural cooperatives for my Master’s thesis.

Regarding the impacts of Coronavirus, a female farmer of Khom Khnat Samaki Rong Roeung Agricultural Cooperative (KKSRAC) in Siem Reap province reported that her family was badly affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. The lockdown of the country kicked her husband and her adult children out of their jobs. The closure of restaurants, schools, tourist destinations, traditional ceremonies, other businesses, and large social events led to decreasing the demand for vegetable production. Therefore, the quantity of her vegetables sold dropped by 30-40% at lower prices.

Another group of women farmers in Battambang province reported similar challenges and hardships during this COVID-19 outbreak. They sold their vegetable production at a lower price and, as a consequence, lacked investment capital for their next cycle of vegetable production. They used to have several sources of income, including selling vegetables and income from their husbands and children working in the towns, capital city, or to the neighboring countries. Since the lockdown, their husbands and children returned home, which meant both loss of income as well as added expenses for food consumption, medical care, and other household expenditures.

Through the Agriculture Rural Development Bank (ARDB), the government provides some mechanisms to help the agricultural sector by offering accessible and low-interest rates to farmers to maintain agriculture production. However, this government support was offered only to small-scale enterprises and larger farm operations, to the exclusion of smallholder farmers. While some of the farmers would have qualified for the stimulus package funds, based on their low income, that program was really more for emergency food relief. It certainly was not designed to help poor smallholders to sustain their farms. Although there is no visible food crisis at this writing, it is vital to support smallholder farmers since they are uniquely positioned to ensure locally accessible and sustainable food production and distribution during this challenging time. Therefore, the government and other development partners should consider targeted support for small-scale producers and smallholder farmers.

COVID-19 Impacts to my Personal Life

During this pandemic I have been living on the other side of the globe from my family back home. My husband and I are the only Cambodians in State College, Pennsylvania, United States. Like most people, we sometimes feel a bit feverish or have a headache now and then, troubles that these days are harder to dismiss. The worries cascade. Have we contracted COVID-19? If so, how should we tell our family back in Cambodia? My mother-in-law and my parents are old. What would happen to them if they heard that?

The COVID-19 outbreak has affected not only farmers but also consumers. As a consumer, I have been leery of consuming storebought meats, vegetables, and fruits. As news and social media have reported, U.S. workers in meatpacking, food processing, and harvesting and production have tested COVID-19 positive. For example, the recent news release titled “Eat This, Not That” reports that 50,000 such workers in the U.S have tested positive since March. To minimize risk, my husband and I grow mung bean and some vegetables and herbs inside our apartment. Sprouting mung bean takes only four to five days. Mung bean sprouts have many uses. They can be used as fresh vegetables for salad, as fried vegetables, and they also can be used to make pickles or even a dessert. By complementing what’s in our refrigerator, all this has helped reduce the need to visit the grocery store. Our cultivation of mung bean sprouts is just one way to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic crisis by finding alternative and safe foods. I hope people across regions and cultures can share other ways of self-producing food.

Photos credits:

“Women and Conservation Agriculture” Ms. Brak Yan, a female leadership member of Khom Khnat Samaki Rong Roeung Agricultural Cooperative (KKSRAC) in Siem Reap province. KKSRAC was under the WAgN-Cambodia.

“Organic vegetables” Ms. Dany and her husband (on the left), a former farmer member of the WAgN-Cambodia; Ms. Channaty Ngang (on the right), a former technical staff of WAgN-Cambodia, Battambang province

 

Sovanneary Huot is a Ph.D. Student in Rural Sociology in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, at The Pennsylvania State University. Her work focuses on Gender, International Agriculture, and Community Development. Her Master’s thesis examines barriers that women farmers in Cambodia face in acquiring and working in leadership positions, as well as their decision-making power.

 

by: Lia Bryant

She stares at yellow fields of wheat flicking past her. The long stretch of road ahead. Feeling the rhythm and dip of the car as she manoeuvres around corners, she notices the size and shape of trees dotted along the open spaces. She holds a conversation with herself; it’s almost a game identifying crops by their growth and colour.

For a qualitative researcher like me, rural research is very much emplaced and sensory. COVID-19 physically removes me from the communities and rural people I partner with and I am increasingly on my mobile phone. On days when the internet is good (it often isn’t in rural Australia), I am on Zoom. My work now involves listening carefully to voices. However, so much of what I have learned about rurality and gender has emerged from being in place and a lot of the time, it’s from being there but feeling out of place.

I have felt ‘out of place’ in rural communities as a city person and/or as a woman in rooms or paddocks where all I can see is a sea of farming men. I dedicated a chapter ‘Sites/sights of exclusion’ in my book Water and Rural Communities to the colonial structure of the water governance building and the white masculinised board room where large heavy portraits of chairmen of the board hang (Bryant, 2016).

I have a vivid memory of my first visit: I was ushered in to sit in high dark wooden chairs along a table that was equally heavy and ornate. I remember thinking this room was reminiscent of a dining hall in an English castle. The furniture was obviously imported when the town was settled – erasing the presence of Indigenous Australians and the waves of non-British migration since 1950. I note the sensations of discomfort growing as my body is forced upright in this formal setting. It is hard to make eye contact with the men who sit up and down the length of this table. I am here to talk about gender and water governance during drought.

At one point in the discussion I ask, “Are there women on the board of the water trust?”

I am met with throaty laughter. “In our 120 years, we haven’t had a woman on the board.”

My body in this space is foreign and I feel it and wonder how a woman (or eventually women) might feel if they are able to navigate a seat at this table.

I enjoy thinking about how the spaces I enter hold histories and take shape materially in bricks and mortar. I think of the Greek Orthodox church in the same small rural town where the colonial building of the water trust resides. I am curious about how spaces come alive through language but also our senses as people enter a local grocery shop in a rural town, a farm house, a shearing shed, vineyards and paddocks. Particularly, I am interested in how we affect one another and how we are affected by the human and more-than-human – objects, land and waterscapes and animals. I often wonder “how do we leave our mark?”

I know that for some people, especially rural and farming women, their impact is sometimes erased – while strong in the fabric of history – their mark is often grainy like the layered and discernible strands of stringy bark on the trunk of a gumtree. By entering the rural as a researcher residing in a city, it has afforded me the opportunity of grappling with the textures of gender politics in place alongside my own gender politics. This memory work exercise I wrote in relation to reflecting on my research practice reveals rurality and gender, that is, body politics in place or the gendering of space in the act of becoming:

She had to go to Mudamuckla. There were no maps and she relied on directions taken from a telephone call. She drove the government car down dirt roads where no buildings or humans were in sight. In the vastness she felt vulnerable and uncertain. Too much space. She saw a shed – could this be the landmark where she was told she must turn right? Again isolation and uncertainty. Deciding to turn right she drove down a narrow dirt path seemingly leading nowhere. Go on or turn back? Well she did go on and found herself in a paddock surrounded by cows. She waved her arms furiously upward trying to catch the male farmer’s attention. He smiled at her…[foolishness] and gave her yet more directions. Arriving at her destination the reliable government sedan seemed to be swerving – Oh God, she thought, I have a flat tyre. Anxiety rose. She attempted to fight back feelings of inadequacy. She must now interview a woman a similar age to herself who works on the local council, runs a farm and has a child. The interview proceeds and the woman generously tells her story. In this space, the woman’s home, she feels awkward but must present as knowledgeable and confident. She feels the difference in their lives, not simply difference about urban or rural lifestyle, but also difference around privilege. She is paid well and lives in a home, the woman lives in a shed. One room is where the family eats and sleeps. There is no bathroom in sight. The time came to leave. How to tell the women the tyre is flat and she can’t change it? She feebly says, ‘I am not used to this type of car and can’t change the tyre.’ The woman hands her the screaming child. She holds it at arm’s length not knowing how to quieten it, not knowing how to hold it. The woman proceeds to change the tyre and pacify the child. She feels inadequate as a woman.  (Bryant and Livholts 2007, 34-35)

In the memory above, I recall how on this day I feel vulnerable in the vastness of the countryside and I feel my body diminished and exposed. I feel ‘out of place’ and stripped of competence (Bryant and Livholts, 2015:169). In this moment, I am being forced to acknowledge my gendered and classed academic body and the both the traditional and non-traditional gendered norms that I am unable to fulfil.

Being ‘in place’ in this memory brings forth embodiment and the embodied nature of vision or how we see rural places from our situated knowledges (Harraway, 1998). As Haraway (1988, 581) so eloquently suggests, being in place ‘reclaim[s] the sensory systems that have been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gazefrom nowhere’.  For me, being in place brings forth a reflexive confrontation with my situated knowledge as a feminist academic shaped by multiple discourses and practices of gender (Bryant and Pini, 2011, 142). Moral judgements also come into place drawn from my situated gaze. Whilst these may come to the fore over the phone, in this instant it is the experience of the visuality of place, the moral middle class judgement of where the woman lives and the sensory and embodied response to how to quieten a crying baby (Bryant and Livholts, 2015). What I understood through abstract knowledge became an experiential lesson. I learned that my moral judgements shaped my emotional, cognitive and sensory responses to feeling out of place. My body, like all bodies is politically, culturally and historically specific, shaped by the politics of the body and is among other things gendered, raced, classed and sexualized (Anderson and Smith, 2001; Probyn, 2005; Bryant and Pini, 2011). As I have argued elsewhere:

‘For Beverley Skeggs (1999, 124) these moral judgements emerge from ‘structures of feeling’, and in this instance the association of femininity with knowing how to provide care and being caring. These “structures of feeling” provide the basis from which women and others interpret and recognize themselves (Skeggs 2004). Hence, feelings of inadequacy are translated as self-blame rather than collective experiences of gendered essentialism and inequality – in which in abstract terms she understands. What we wish to underscore is that emotions are intrinsically political as are the evaluative judgments, which work as “loaded moral signifier[s]” (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst 2001, 889) of gender and other key social categories’. (Bryant and Livholts, 2015, 169-170).

Looking back at this memory of myself as a younger woman in my 20s, I also learn that the embodied gaze of the woman I interviewed is missing. I wonder what the experience of my visit was like for her? Did I disrupt, reinforce or in any way shape her sense of place and gender?

Here I am 32 years later at a time most of us could not have imagined. As a rural researcher, I have always taken for granted that I can get into a car and a few hours later be outside of the city. I have always taken for granted that I have access to being in place to experience and be challenged. Simply put, to feel place. It is important to me as a rural researcher to shape my praxis through attempting to understand the people I research with, the communities I collaborate with and in and out of this context to attempt to understand myself. Recently, I had a telephone interview with a male farmer about co-designing resources for the prevention of male farmer suicide. I have been working on this topic for some years and I advocate for a place-based approach to tailoring suicide prevention that is community driven and state supported. I now need to undertake this research by phone.

I have always liked the rhythm and the nonsensical feeling to the word discombobulate. In the first instance, telephone-based research discombobulates me. At the time, I write:

She got the time wrong. Of course there is a time difference across the states in Australia. She knows this. She rings people all the time in other states. But today she rings at the appointed 1 pm. 1 pm in New South Wales not her home town. She receives an email, “hey Lia did we get mixed up with our time zones? ..I am available at 4 if you can ring”. The farmer is so gracious.

Time is disrupted through the virtual especially crossing time zones. But as I have been arguing, so are other things. I learn from the virtual some important lessons. The first, and most obvious – check the time in places other than your own! Secondly, a telephone interview requires me to listen differently. I am transfixed, I hold the phone tight as though this might bring me closer to where he is. I only have the voice in which to determine how he is feeling, how interested he is in the topic, how to build a relationship with him and put him at ease. I have to think about how I would hear gendered cues, how I would hear if a farming man is comfortable talking to me about male farmer suicide. Thirdly, and most importantly, will the phone make this easier or harder for him to communicate his emotions, experiences and ideas?

Sarah Ahmed’s (2004) argument that voices suppress and express emotions reshapes the way I hear. I attempt to determine what is being suppressed as well as expressed. I hear the pauses in how he speaks. The pauses I feel deep in my body. I think he pauses to garner space, to tentatively consider what is to be said next and how to expresses his emotions. I think I hear him more clearly than if we were face-to-face sitting across a kitchen table or walking across paddocks.

Literature focused on the telephone suggests that one of the first questions people ask when calling mobile phones is ‘Where are you?’ (Garcia-Montes et al., 2006). It is interesting how we wish to place people. However, a phone conversation is anything but ‘unlocated’ and people may be in multiple spaces within place as conversations unfold. As Bryant and Livholts (2013, 12) suggest:

when receiving and making telephone calls in the home it cannot be assumed that the individual is in one physical space during the course of the conversation…nor can it be assumed that there is one cognitive space as there is the possibility that the person is distracted, multitasking or indeed even having more than one conversation at the same time.

Despite COVID restricting public movements, it is movements that happen in private spaces during moments of a telephone interview that cannot really be known. Face-to-face (and Zoom) interviews, more often than not, fix people in place. During this time of restriction, perhaps there is more to be learned about how farming women and men move through private spaces and how this may shape how they narrate their lives and express emotions during telephone interviews.

I am suggesting a sensory engagement with place provides a stream of memories. It also enables a reflexive engagement with places and spaces which enables rural researchers to learn about the texture and complexity of how gendering occurs in time and place. It provides us with a location in which to examine how farmers negotiate social relations and our situatedness that disrupts time and place as we enter the rural.

I think of the yellow fields of wheat and wonder how long it will be until I see them flickering past once again. I look out the window of my own home. Paved garden, trimmed roses. Whilst I am away from the rural by necessity, I remain engaged with places and people and continue to seek understanding about the multiplicities of gender in place.

Sources:

Ahmed, S. (2004) Declarations of whiteness: The non-performativity of antiracism. Borderlands e-journal 3(2).

Anderson, K. and Smith, S.J. (2001) Editorial, Emotional Geographies, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 27, 7-10.

Bryant, L. with George, J. (2016). Water and Rural Communities. Oxon: Routledge.

Bryant, L. and Livholts, M. 2013 Location and Unlocation: Examining Gender and Telephony Through Autoethnographic Textual and Visual Methods, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 12, (1): 403-419.

Bryant, L. and Livholts, M. (2015) Memory Work and Reflexive Gendered Bodies: Examining Rural Landscapes in the Making, in eds Pini, B., Brandth, B.and Little, J., Rural Feminisms, Lanham: Lexington Books, 181-194

Bryant, L. and Pini, B., (2011) Gender and Rurality, NY and UK, Routledge.

Garcia-Montes, J.M., Caballero-Munõ,  D. and Pérez-Álvarez, M. (2006) Changes in the Self Resulting from the use of Mobile Phones. Media, Culture & Society, 28(1): 67–82.

Haraway, D. (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.

Probyn, E. (2005) Blush: Faces of Shame, Sydney: University of New South Wales.

Professor Lia Bryant is a rural sociologist and her work focuses on gender and rurality. She has published a series of articles and books including Gender and Rurality, 2011 co-authored with Barbara Pini and Water and Rural Communities published in 2016. Her work focuses on intersectionality, farmer suicide and distress and water politics, affect and gendered embodiment.