Dozens of hours selecting and organizing literature like a robot. Going back and forth to check decisions I made to include or exclude papers, because I need to confess: I am a human being with mood swings and doubts – not a robot.

Being confronted with essential, but difficult questions concerning the content, goal and scope of my research. How to define the kind of food aid initiatives I focus on? How does the national and cultural context shape my research? Which other national contexts could be relevant, why those and others not?

Cursing the choice I made to take dignity as the main concept in my PhD research. A concept that is studied in many fields without one clear definition, that doesn´t have a general meaning applicable to various situations, and which reveals contradictions in itself (as an objective and subjective phenomenon, public and private or inalienable and something that can be destroyed).

These are just a few of the challenges I faced while conducting my scoping review. As part of my PhD project about the dignity of recipients in divers food aid contexts in Europe, I investigated what is known in scientific literature about ways in which the dignity of recipients is violated and protected in diverse contexts of third sector food aid in high-income countries.

Don’t worry! This blogpost will not be an elegy about my journey of conducting a literature review. On the contrary, conducting a scoping review as part of my PhD research was a very rewarding experience for me, sparking new energy for my research. Join me as I share how the challenges described above actually gave me joy and rewarded me.

(The satisfaction of) Systematically selecting relevant articles

Even though I dare to say that I am quite familiar with the literature addressing issues of dignity in food aid contexts in high-income countries – as I read about this since the start of my PhD project in 2018 -, I looked for a way to explore the broad field of research and select relevant articles in a systematic and rigorous way. This is exactly what the methodology of a scoping review allowed me to do: identify and select relevant articles based on explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria. By means of selecting literature in this way, I dare to say that the selection isn’t just a result of my computers’ algorithm and my tunnel vision.

While the prospect of systematically scanning thousands of potentially relevant articles makes some of my colleagues shiver, I personally found great enjoyment in having a clear mission and explicit criteria to include or exclude articles, counting down the numbers. This felt similar as my passion for endurance sports, where I take pleasure in swimming exactly 80 laps in the pool or running 10 km on the treadmill counting the miles and minutes as a form of mindfulness.

Deliberating complexities

Conducting a literature review involves making numerous choices and navigating various considerations, e.g.: How to define the kind of food aid I focus on? What do I exactly mean with dignity? Which national contexts to include? Though I sometimes felt resistance against defining concepts that cannot be captured by one clear description and making choices I didn’t want to make, in the end these essential questions in terms of framing and defining helped me a lot in locating my research in relation to other (research) fields.

Recognizing the subjectivity inherent in this process, this challenge also made me realize how crucial it is to have partners to deliberate on these complexities and to make explicit the decisions and choices that shaped the research. In this regard, I collaborated with MSc. Roos Scholten and Dr. Laura van der Velde, in addition to my PhD supervisors (Dr. Hilje van der Horst and Dr. Oona Morrow), who were invaluable in providing insights and guidance.

The ‘dignity’ challenge

One significant challenge encountered during the scoping review was the identification of literature that addressed issues of dignity. This difficulty stemmed from the fact that the impact of food aid on recipients is often described without explicit reference to the term dignity but by a diversity of signs of dignity violation and protection, such as feelings of shame, anger, pride or social processes like dependence, discrimination, and belonging. To overcome this challenge, I revisited theoretical frameworks on dignity, particularly exploring the concept of social dignity.

Utilizing these theories, I developed an extensive query to identify signs of dignity violation and protection and applied them during the analysis of selected articles. While this brought me closer to capturing diverse empirical understandings of dignity, I also needed to conclude that fully covering all the signs of (in)dignity in case studies about food aid was impossible. The identification of situations in which dignity is at stake will always remain interpretation and therefore will be referred to by emotions and dynamics shaped by the specific context.

Initially used as a means to identify relevant literature, the value of adopting a social dignity lens eventually emerged as a central argument within our paper. Through this lens, I was able to develop a comprehensive understanding of dignity across diverse food aid contexts, delving into moralities, social hierarchies, the autonomy and integrity of recipients in such situations. This unexpected outcome fortified the foundation of my PhD research, propelling it beyond case-specific understandings of the dignity of food aid recipients I had so far. This also sparked ideas for future research.

Conclusion: A rewarding journey

Despite, or actually because of, the difficulties and complexities I faced during this scoping review, it was a rewarding experience for me. It compelled me to address pivotal questions related to my PhD project and provided answers to essential inquiries. The process of conducting this review directed me to refine and expand my approach to dignity, rendering it applicable to a multitude of cases. This review enriched my understanding of the intricate dynamics surrounding the dignity of recipients in diverse food aid settings, and – now it is published – hopefully for many other people as well.

You can read the end-result in the journal of Agriculture and Human Values: How the social dignity of recipients is violated and protected across various forms of food aid in high-income countries: a scoping review | Agriculture and Human Values (springer.com).