This paper is a reflective discussion of the research method developed by a small research team over a 5-year period as it intra-acted with the south Asian monsoon in three south/southeast Asian cities. It reflects on how the team's practice was transformed from being research on or about the monsoon as a discrete unit of analysis, to research in the monsoon and with its agential materiality. The paper first outlines the theoretical resources from cultural geography, anthropology, feminist theory, posthuman theory, and science and technology studies that the project drew from. After this theoretical section, the paper then discusses the practical implications of the method and the two emergent strands of research ('weather matters' and 'construction matters') that were followed in Chennai, Dhaka, and Yangon. The final section of the paper reflects on the extension of the method into the formatting of a book and an online exhibition. The paper concludes by arguing that what the method offers to cultural, weather-based research in monsoonal and other climes, is a situated, non-formulaic method that recognizes the affordances of the Earth's agency, of matter and of other-than-human lives for generating knowledge of and ways of being in changing weather-worlds.

AbstractThis chapter examines the trajectory of analytical frameworks and gender tools intended to understand and address the challenges and inequities that shape women’s engagement in agriculture. We argue that while a focus on tools in many agricultural development projects can help to identify barriers faced by women, it often does little to address the structural inequality in which women are embedded. We highlight the tendencies of tool-led gender analysis within agricultural projects to: (1) detach tools from their theoretical frameworks, (2) ignore the structural and socio-political obstacles to gender equality in specific contexts, and (3) view tools as silver bullets to address “gender problems” while primarily serving technical agendas. We argue that the co-option, sanitization and de-politicization of gender tools is partly the result of social scientists having to fit within institutional systems dominated by certain scientific logics, frameworks, disciplinary orientations, and social norms. We recommend that meaningful attempts to facilitate gender equality and women’s empowerment should be based on politically informed, contextualized understandings that are relevant to people’s lived realities, rather than concepts, tools, and data that are externally constructed and applied by outsiders to meet normative scientific, donor, and development agendas.

This article explores volatility from the perspective of hilsa fish in the Bengal Delta. The hilsa, known as ilish in Bengali, takes advantage of monsoonal hydrological dynamics in its life cycle. Today, hilsa are changing in response to anthropogenic activities, which attempt to stabilise delta landscapes in response to perceived volatility, but generate new volatilities that are felt and sensed corporeally by people who are entangled with hilsa lifeways. Interactions with a fisher, a cook, a scientist and an environmental activist during multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh provide insights into how hilsa are experiencing and responding to spatial, material and tempo-ral environmental transformations. Embodied understandings of hilsa lifeworlds gained through acts of fishing, cooking, dissecting and monitoring reveal the more-than-human reverberations of human-induced volatility.

Public sector crop improvement for development programmes aims to produce varieties tailored to the needs of smallholder farmers and their environments. Understanding how social heterogeneity, including gender, drives trait preferences is essential to ensure that crop improvement objectives meet farmers’ and stakeholder demands. This requires an interdisciplinary approach, integrating social science knowledge with crop breeding. Although the necessity of interdisciplinary research is recognised and promoted, it is impeded by a multitude of challenges including ontological and epistemological differences, institutional and global hierarchies, disciplinary power relations and struggles for scientific authority. The Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) sector is marked by entrenched power differentials, including dominance of the biophysical sciences, a historical emphasis on technical solutions which ignores social contexts, and the underrepresentation of women scientists and farmers themselves. Nevertheless, there is limited theoretically informed analysis of power dynamics within AR4D settings. Drawing on qualitative, ethnographic observations of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement (ILCI), this article seeks to understand how power affects interdisciplinary research processes. Critical ethnography and power theory is used to analyse power within international crop breeding collaborations and the implications for inclusive knowledge production and research impact. The Powercube is used to examine how visible, hidden and invisible forms of power manifest within local, national, and international relationships across closed, invited and claimed spaces. Our findings suggest that these intersecting power dimensions, which include disciplinary, gendered, institutional and global hierarchies, constrain the contributions that individual researchers can make – particularly social scientists – thereby hindering disciplinary integration. The ILCI case study reveals the complex multi-dimensional dynamics that emerge within agricultural research teams and highlights structural limitations constraining efforts to build socially inclusive and gender-responsive crop improvement programmes. The article contributes to a small but growing literature studying the social construction of agricultural science, and provides insights that can enable interdisciplinary research strategies to more effectively meet the needs of farmers and other stakeholders.

Abstract This article explores volatility from the perspective of hilsa fish in the Bengal Delta. The hilsa, known as ilish in Bengali, takes advantage of monsoonal hydrological dynamics in its life cycle. Today, hilsa are changing in response to anthropogenic activities, which attempt to stabilise delta landscapes in response to perceived volatility, but generate new volatilities that are felt and sensed corporeally by people who are entangled with hilsa lifeways. Interactions with a fisher, a cook, a scientist and an environmental activist during multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh provide insights into how hilsa are experiencing and responding to spatial, material and temporal environmental transformations. Embodied understandings of hilsa lifeworlds gained through acts of fishing, cooking, dissecting and monitoring reveal the more-than-human reverberations of human-induced volatility. Résumé Cet article analyse la volatilité du point de vue du poisson hilsa dans le delta du Bengale. Le hilsa, également connu sous le nom de ilish en bengali, exploite la dynamique hydraulogique de la mousson au cours de son cycle de vie. Aujourd'hui, on constate que le poisson hilsa a changé en réponse aux activités anthropique qui tentent de stabiliser l'espace du delta contre sa volatilité perçue. Cette action créé une nouvelle volatilité qui est perçu par les personnes vivant étroitement avec le poisson hilsa. L’étude est basée sur une ethnographie multisite et des interactions avec un pêcheur, un cuisinier, un scientifique et un activiste écologique au Bangladesh, dont l'objectif était de comprendre comment les expériences avec et l’étude du hisla permettent de saisir les transformations de l'environnement à l’œuvre. Le savoir incorporé des rythmes de vie du hilsa à travers l'activité de pêche, de cuisine, de dissection ou de surveillance donne à voir les réverbérations sur le non-humain de la volatilité induite par l'homme.

This visual essay offers an exploration of monsoonal materiality and agency in the urban environments of three cities situated around the Bay of Bengal: Chennai, Dhaka and Yangon. The text and images emerge from Monsoon Assemblages, a research project exploring intersections between changing monsoon climates and rapid urbanization in South Asia. Multi-modal, more-than-human ethnography has been employed during the course of research to explore how the lively materiality of the monsoon is entangled within urban lived environments. The essay outlines the process of intuiting a monsoonal ethnography and conveys the power of immersive field experience. By collecting and curating an assemblage of visual material and fieldnotes, this piece seeks to evoke the materiality and agency of the monsoon, itself a complex assemblage that manifests in different ways in different places. The juxtaposition of image and text conveys the generative and multifaceted agency of the monsoon and the urban environments it becomes enmeshed within.

Using follow-the-thing methods and insights from ethnographic fieldwork, this paper traces the meteorological mobilities entwined within Bangladesh bricks. Following the extended lifecycle of theBanglabrick from sediment to clay, from clay to brick and from brick to sediment, and the role that monsoon weathering plays in these processes, reveals complex entanglements of mobilities and materialities. A more-than-human mobilities perspective highlights the myriad human and nonhuman circulations that constitute the brick, as well as the geological, atmospheric and hydrological dynamics that brickmaking sets in motion. Through the becoming and unbecoming of the brick, the paper explores how the mobile materiality of the monsoon is enmeshed within the building blocks of Bangladesh's cities and the infrastructures on which they depend and how, in turn, the mobile materiality of the brick influences monsoonal environments. These intra-active entanglements trouble perceived dichotomies between society and meteorological forces and highlight the agentive role of weather systems in social worlds.

Organic farming is knowledge intensive. To support farmers in improving yields and organic agriculture systems, there is a need to improve how knowledge is shared. There is an established culture of sharing ideas, successes and failures in farming. The internet and information technologies open-up new opportunities for knowledge exchange involving farmers, researchers, advisors and other practitioners. The OK-Net Arable brought together practitioners from regional Farmer Innovation Groups across Europe in a multi-actor project to explore how online knowledge exchange could be improved. Feedback from the groups was obtained for 35 ‘tools’, defined as end-user materials, such as technical guides, videos and websites informing about practices in organic agriculture. The groups also selected one practice to test on farms, sharing their experiences with others through workshops, exchange visits and through videos. Farmers valued the same key elements in face-to-face exchanges (workshops and visits) as in online materials. These were the opportunity for visual observation, deeper understanding of the context in which a practice was being tried and details about what worked and what did not work. Videos, decision support tools and social media can provide useful mechanisms for taking knowledge exchange online, enabling farmers and researchers to share experiences and practical implications. Visual information, economics, details of the context, successes and failures were considered to be critical factors in good knowledge exchange tools. Online platforms and forums should not be expected to replace but rather to complement face to face knowledge exchange in improving organic farming.

Recent scholarship has contributed important insights into the political dynamics inherent in the process of making and showing participatory videos. As a research method and an instrument for social change, participatory video has both potential and limitations for overturning the power dynamics embedded within research and in development processes. This paper focuses on experiences of incorporating participatory video in land management projects in four countries in Africa. Along with other participatory methods, the videos represented an effort to include community perspectives and objectives into the research process. Analysis of participatory video has largely focused on examining the tensions and contradictions involved in the process of making participatory videos. There has been less focus on the content of the videos themselves and what it might suggest for empowerment, voice and representation. This paper attempts to address this gap by examining the implications of the narratives that emerge in five different videos. On the surface, the participants appear to repeat dominant national and global narratives about land degradation. However, the fact that farmers present themselves as experts on these topics and the ways in which they appropriate and reconfigure the dominant narratives, can be seen as an act of empowerment. In this way, they preclude the need for external intervention on how to manage their resources.

Dynamic innovation processes and differences in interests, capacities, and power present challenges for platform facilitators. Based on group reflection on their own personal experiences facilitating innovation platforms, Chapter 10 (Swaans et al.) discusses key issues that are critical for effective platform facilitation.

Many participatory processes fail to generate social change and collaborative outcomes. This failure can partly be explained by how divergent stakeholders' frames are handled. This paper builds on the framing and participation literature to explain how facilitators can manage frame diversity and foster collaborative outcomes. It suggests two pragmatic steps: identifying frames and managing frames. The two steps are applied to a participatory process for natural resource management in Fogera, Ethiopia. Effectiveness of facilitators' strategies to manage frame diversity in the Fogera case is discussed. Two main elements challenging effectiveness are identified: counter-strategies used by facilitators and most-powerful stakeholders, and the constraining factors knowledge, champions and frame sponsorship. We argue that these elements need to be taken into account by participatory process facilitators when managing frame diversity.

Men and women interact with water resources and landscapes in different ways, and there are frequent criticisms that little research is undertaken across disciplines to address this issue. Biophysical scientists in particular struggle with how to integrate "gendered" water uses into models that are necessarily based on prevailing laws and equations that describe the movement of water through the hydrological cycle, independent of social constructs. We explore the challenges faced in developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches and then present a simple yet innovative socio-hydrological approach using participatory three-dimensional maps. As a case study, we describe undertaking this process in Ethiopia where two three-dimensional maps (men's and women's) were separately generated to represent the same 20 km(2) landscape. Mapping results indicated important distinctions in how men and women view landscapes with regard to the number and types of ecosystem services identified. For example, only women identified holy water sites along streams, while men identified twice as many sacred trees on the landscape. There was a clear focus and detailed knowledge about soils among participants in both groups. Maps developed as part of this exercise were successfully used as the principal land use input for the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and results indicate that this is a valid strategy that enhances scientific knowledge and understanding of overall landscapes and ultimately adds value to research for development questions. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

SUMMARYThis article discusses how decentralisation policies are enacted in the planning and implementation of natural resource management interventions in rural Ethiopia. A key element of decentralisation policy is the emphasis on greater participation by local communities. Drawing on qualitative research conducted with government staff and farmers, this paper illustrates how different actors perceive and implement national policy and how these actions affect the longer‐term sustainability of land management interventions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.