Category Archives: Methods/Methodology

‘Let it flow: Navigating hydropower conflicts in southern Chile’ – PhD thesis defense by Maite Hernando Arrese

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On Monday 4 December 2023 at 16.00 CET Maite Hernando Arrese will publicly defend her PhD thesis entitled ‘Let it flow: Navigating hydropower conflicts in southern Chile’. The defense will take place in the Omnia Auditorium and will also be broadcasted live (a link will appear in the events box, in the upper left corner of the screen). The full thesis can be read online or downloaded (usually from the first day after the PhD defense onwards) from the repository of Wageningen University PhD theses or by clicking on the DOI link.

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Navigating a scoping review

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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.

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Struggling to find struggles: developing a research on social movements of Florence

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Cristiano Bartolini

I began my MSc research thesis in June 2021, at the end of the second pandemic wave, which forced the world (back) inside, into our homes. I was frustrated and upset that I would probably not be able to conduct research beyond Europe’s borders – or outside my own room, even. At the start of my master’s, I was looking forward to the thesis, quite naively romanticising, in fact, picturing myself as a young researcher in the middle of rural fields, maybe in Latin America, living near native communities that struggle for social and human rights. After the pandemic hit, I had to surrender this idea and recalibrate my research expectations. I refocused my research aims and decided to start a study on social movements in Florence, my hometown.

I had never really thought of researching in a city: during my studies, I had unconsciously neglected its potential to enact a real change in society. The urban context, to me, was a negative environment from which good changes could not emerge. As various authors argue, the city is the centre of capitalistic life, it is the producer of huge economic surpluses, always looking for new outlets to absorb this endless profit that it constantly generates, and this, eventually, brings a lot of socio-economic problems to residents. Let me explain this with an example that ultimately becomes the background of my research.

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Analysing the PKK’s Rebel Governance: Data Limitations and some Potential Solutions

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Francis O’Connor, Postdoc at the Rural Sociology Group and Kamuran Akin, Independent Researcher

The content of insurgent movements’ publications can be telling, yet the issues which they exclude or deny can be of even greater illustrative value. Downplaying violence against civilians or sources of illicit funding can be expected, but what of movements who ignore practises of rebel governance, which are not only popular with their supportive constituencies but also bestow legitimacy with the international public? This paper looks at the puzzling case of the PKK whose publications systematically neglected forms of governance – in particular its alternative justice systems –  it implemented at the height of its insurgency in Turkey through the 1980s and 1990s.

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Researching in Zapatista Communities: Listen more, ask less

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Beatriz Lopes Cerqueira, Master’s Student, Environmental Sciences – Environmental Policy at Wageningen University

For my MSc thesis research, I decided to travel to the home of one of my special interests, the Zapatista movement, which has been fighting with and for the dignity of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, Mexico, and learn their particular views and practices towards Nature, natural resources and the preservation of the environment.

The relationship established between the Zapatistas and me followed what I believe to be the fundamental properties of emotional relations(hips) – those based on the mutual exchange of ideas and feelings, trust, and respect. For me, these kinds of connections require a careful management of our thoughts and feelings as emotional beings and the ways in which these are interchanged. Thus, for my research with the Zapatistas, I engaged in a long and complex process of analysing and evaluating the best way to create a relationship based on reciprocity and trust. Later on, I tried to apply these reflections in my own research process. Which methods and methodology would allow me to build trust with the Zapatistas, to conduct research without blindly extracting their knowledge? Which would be the best tools for telling the story of the Zapatistas’ ecological consciousness and the values, emotions and worldmaking processes that make up their cosmovision? For academic research, I believe that methodological choice(s) are the most important foundation for a steady and lasting relationship.

When I started to think about my fieldwork, I decided to do exploratory work in Oventik, one of the Zapatistas’ autonomous centres, in the highlands of Chiapas, before beginning.

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