Research Diaries

Post 1: 16th January 2024- Finally opening my computer!

Iloilo City, Western Visayas, Philippines

Finally opening my computer properly for the first time in a month. Have been on Christmas holidays with the kids since the 16th of December so I couldn’t have opened my laptop even if I wanted to. Before that I have been 100% on parental leave since January 2023, I only just started up with small work things little by little in October. As I start to write here I am almost crippled with the anxiety of having missed 1 year of work with my second child and the huge amount of catch-up to do that is weighing heavily on my mind, my shoulders and my chest (which is tight). I thought a good way to get back into work and try to relieve some stress was to start with this field diary. I am just going to lay out all my thoughts and feelings here as I dive into life in the Philippines with kids and partner in tow. My family and I have just arrived here on friday, my partner and my two sons (10 months and 3 years). We are beginning the mobile part of my early career mobility grant from Formas. It makes me sweat to think everyone is here because of me, should something go wrong and one of the kids get sick I don’t know what I would do. So that’s another part of the anxiety that is eating away at me. There are a couple of threads! Another major thread is here I am again, a WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) Irish chick landed in somebody else’s country (in the Global South) to do research that largely benefits herself! How did it happen again? I feel so unbelievably frustrated and uncomfortable- yet again. All I want to do in life is contribute research to practitioners, to those that maybe don’t have the time to deep dive into topics of importance for their work implementing and supporting coastal governance practices for fair and equitable livelihoods. I thought I had found practitioners I could support in my postdoc but they quit the larger project so I lost that connection. This mobility grant was based on my PhD where I collaborated with the University of the Philippines Visayas, so I don’t have any practitioner contacts in the Philippines at the current moment. When I wrote the grant I tried to contact some but didn’t get any answers, which is of course understandable. I needed money to survive as I am the breadwinner and my contract is project based so I had to write the grant quickly so as to support my family. I’m fully aware that true transdisciplinarity comes with co-creation, equal buy-in and shared agency in the research process, but I don’t know how to achieve that. I don’t have a big network after my PhD unfortunately so I feel a little alone to be honest and postdoc projects just run into/over each other so you are just full of leftovers from the first one as you start the second. Having two kids really screwed over my time to put out feelers and try to set up meetings to write a grant that makes sense to practitioners. But again the only experience I have is in the Global South’s coastal systems, as during my masters that’s where I was most interested in and wanted to study (Ghana’s tuna export industry). In fact, my whole life I’ve been more interested in learning about cultures in South America, North Africa, Sub Saharan Africa, South East Asia and more, and I don’t know why. But now as I research in the Philippines and East Africa, based from Sweden, it makes me look like a big old neocoloniser using academia as a way to extract knowledge up to my ivory tower. It was questions of global inequality that drew me to research in the majority world, the unequal spread of resources and functional formal governance processes. I always wondered about where my fish came from and how people in a whole other part of the world were affected by me buying and eating this fish in my comfortable Irish or Swedish setting. What do those with the least resources get out of supplying the global north with seafood products? Those questions lead me to my current position, here in Iloilo City in Western Visayas Region 6. Im sitting uncomfortably though, as what I really want is to contribute to the decolonizing of academia. I am aware of the history of the Philippines, the many hundreds of years of colonization they went through, which lingers in disciplines, worldview and interpretations of the Filipino/a. Reading about indigenous research methods and Sikolohiyang Filipino (Filipino Psychology) makes me more and more aware of who I am, why I’m here and how my behaviour and interactions affect those I come into contact with. All I want to do is support and assist Philippine researchers and students here at UPV (University of the Philippines Visayas), but I don’t know how, I think my collaborators think I just want to do research. I want to provide data to the Fisheries department here, but how can I really do that if I already have a project that is already ongoing so doesnt ask the questions they need (because I had to write a grant quickly to get some salary)? I guess things will sort themselves out, I already feel better after getting my worries out onto paper (well a screen). I’ll just have to move through the uncomfortable space of yet again being a westerner here in the majority world, doing interviews (yes I know more interviews but I wanted to start this project off with open questions to people) and being on the outside. Maybe I can be of use to someone somewhere somehow. Yes it’s maybe weird a WEIRD girl is here, but my innate interests lie in coastal systems far away from Irish shores that perhaps are more instalbe, marginalized and voiceless.

For more info on this project see Patron of the Seas home page here