A reflection on the workshop Sharing Field Notes

On Monday May 26^th, our colleague Anna Roodhof (PhD Candidate at Rural Sociology) attended a workshop on sharing field notes, which was organized by Leiden University, DANS-KNAW (Data Archiving and Networked Services), ISS (the Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University), and PNN (the Netherlands’ PhD Candidates Network). This workshop was organized to discuss qualitative data – field notes in particular – in the context of open science, specifically the FAIR and CARE principles.

Field notes are a type of data collection that is very common at the Rural Sociology Group and elsewhere: they are prevalent in many disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, sociology, archeology, ethnobotany, and ecology. These notes are often textual, but can include visual components such as sketches or photos. They can be written for a variety of reasons: to provide context, to serve as primary data, or to explicate the researcher’s positionality in the field. While it is uncommon for this type of data to be published in full, it can be done.

𝗥𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 the way citizenship shapes our agricultural and food systems. Engage with critical debates on justice, fairness, and the democratization of food provisioning.

𝗥𝗲𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲 agriculture through the lens of agrarian and food citizenship. Explore how individuals and movements challenge existing systems and build equitable alternatives.

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Publication | Proud to share the publication of our colleague YiLing Hung in the online journal APRIA – a journal for artistic research. For this edition the theme was “Being in Relation: Art as Ecology”. 

YiLing’s article is written from the perspective of a performance maker in responding to the theme: Art as Ecology. Performance creates a new ‘in-between’ space—the imagined place between the real and the fictional world, which is situated inside the heads of the spectators. We can say performance ‘makes space,’ opening up the possibility for everyday space to become ‘strange, wondrous, and provocative.’ As a performance maker, she has been attempting to find answer(s) to the question: Where is the line that separates a daily life event and a (theatrical) performance? This article is a self-reflection and further articulation on her performance work Moving On/ Vanishing, which was created in 2018 and was invited for performance again during the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (PQ) in 2023.

Read the article here.

Georgia Diamanti, PhD candidate at the Rural Sociology Group, shares her experience working on the SWIFT project, focusing on the impact of European agricultural policies on women farmers and the importance of collaborative, bottom-up approaches.

“As a PhD candidate at the Rural Sociology Group, I’m proud to be part of the SWIFT project, working with diverse stakeholders to create more inclusive agricultural policies in Europe. This collaborative approach inspires me, knowing that even small contributions can be part of a larger transformation.”

Find out more about the SWIFT project here.