Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA)

Volunteered - Oral Presentation Session

Anthropologists orchestrating collaboration: insights from anthropological leadership of a six country transdisciplinary research partnership on the social economy of dried fish in South and Southeast Asia

Food and Nutrition, Fisheries, Southern Asia

Presenter(s)

• 

  Derek Johnson

  Professor
  University of Manitoba, Department of Anthropology

Co-Author(s)

Fabiana lI (Dr. (University of Manitoba)

In April 2018, the project Dried Fish Matters: Mapping the Social Economy of Dried Fish in South and Southeast Asia for Enhanced Wellbeing and Nutrition (DFM) was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The project is funded under the Partnership Grant funding envelope of SSHRC, a program that aims to encourage creative interdisciplinary research within the social sciences on pressing social questions. DFM’s mandate extends beyond the social sciences to include not only natural scientists and participants from the humanities, but also participants from government and civil society organizations. Some participants in the project are keenly aware of knowledge politics, and are informed by feminism, post-colonialism, and transdisciplinarity in particular. For others, deliberate engagement across knowledge boundaries is new, and they find such discussions disorienting or impenetrable. This paper is a first stock taking of the internal dynamics of DFM. It asks how the formulation and leadership of the project by an anthropologist, and the significant but minority participation of anthropologists in the project, have together helped to internalize an institutional capacity for self-reflection. The evidence for an anthropological style of project management is then matched against tensions that have emerged in the project and the quality of the research effort to date.