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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The desire to stay

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The Dutch nitrogen crisis has emphatically illuminated the gap between “Randstad” and “Randland”. But exactly how wide is the gap? Is there merely a struggle for money, production and nature? A story about the pain of the disappearing ‘home’.

Bettina Bock was asked by Sociologie Magazine to write an essay about farmers and rural dwellers in the context of their early 2023 issue on ‘conflict’. Together with Jolien Klok they employed the concept of restanza to reflect on current rural discontent in the Netherlands. Unfortunately it’s only available in Dutch, click here to read the essay.

Unpacking gender mainstreaming: a critical discourse analysis of agricultural and rural development policy in Myanmar and Nepal by Dawn Cheong et al.

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Dawn Cheong is PhD-candidate at the Rural Sociology Group (dawn.cheong@wur.nl) . Her first paper has just been published open access in ‘Agriculture and Human Values‘:
Cheong, D.D., Bock, B. & Roep, D. (2023) Unpacking gender mainstreaming: a critical discourse analysis of agricultural and rural development policy in Myanmar and Nepal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10502-x.

Abstract
Conventional gender analysis of development policy does not adequately explain the slow progress towards gender equality. Our research analyses the gender discourses embedded in agricultural and rural development policies in Myanmar and Nepal. We find that both countries focus on increasing women’s participation in development activities as a core gender equality policy objective. This creates a binary categorisation of participating versus non-participating women and identifies women as responsible for improving their position. At the same time, gender (in)equality is defined exclusively as a women’s concern. Such discourses, as constitutive practices, produce specific knowledge about rural women and new subjectivities that prescribe and govern them solely as subjects of development. Our research suggests that such a limited discursive practice invisiblises gendered power relations and structural and institutional issues, ultimately slowing progress towards gender equality. We demonstrate the importance of studying policy as discourse, beyond the effectiveness of policies or mainstreaming tools, and call for empirical evidence on the impact of these discourses on women’s subjectivities and lived experiences.

New Food Forestry course – you can now register yourself

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This Capita Selecta course is organized by Stichting ReGeneratie in collaboration the Rural Sociology chair group. The course is not funded by the university and contains many excursions. We therefore need to ask a course fee of €100 person for traveling, meals and tours. You will be visiting the oldest food forests and meet the key players in food forestry in the Netherlands. You can register yourself by completing this form.