Agents of change? The challenges of understanding empowerment through international development
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Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Good evening, everyone. Good evening. Welcome to LSE for this hybrid event. My name is Claire Mercer. I'm Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

I'm very pleased to be here to welcome Professor Joe Sharp to our online audience and our audience here in the auditorium today for the fourth lecture in our series organised in memory of our colleague Professor Sylvia Chant.

Jo Sharp is Professor of Geography at the University of St Andrews. Jo is an internationally leading human geographer whose work has been at the forefront of feminist and political geography for the last three decades. Her research has been concerned with post-colonialism, health and critical geopolitics.

Her early work extended what's considered to be the geopolitical beyond the formal spheres of statecraft to include popular culture and the everyday. And she's continued this through her work, her post-colonial work on Sir Bolton geopolitics. She's the author of numerous works, including most recently the book Geographies of Post-Colonialism, Spaces of Power and Representation, the second edition of which was published by SAGE in 2022.

In 2022, Jo was named Geographer Royal for Scotland. In today's lecture, Jo will draw on two research collaborations, one with Bedouin women and local academics in Egypt's southeastern desert, and another with an interdisciplinary and international One Health project in northern Tanzania.

Reflecting on these experiences, Joe is going to explore the assumptions we make about people's abilities and desires to act as agents of change. For those ex-formally Twitter users, the hashtag for today's event is hashtag LSE events, all one word. This event is being recorded and will hopefully be made available as a podcast subject to no technical difficulties.

As usual, there'll be the chance for you to put your questions to our speaker at the end. For our online audience, you can submit your questions via the Q&A feature at the top left of your screen. Please let us know your name and affiliation, and we're particularly keen to hear from our students and alumni.

For those of you here in the theatre, I'll let you know when we'll open the floor for questions. If you can raise your hand and then wait for the microphone and I'll ask you to provide your name and affiliation before posing your question. And I'll try and ensure a range of questions from both our online audience and our audience here in the theatre. And after the theatre, we invite you to join us for a drinks reception in the foyer just outside of the lecture theatre from 8 o'clock. And we'd love to see you there.

But now, I'm delighted to hand over to Professor Jo Sharp. I'm going to stand down here if that's alright. Thank you, first of all, to Claire and Gareth for this invitation. I'm really beyond honoured to have been asked to present this lecture in honour of Sylvia Chant. Sadly, I did not know Sylvia well, but she did have a significant and lasting influence on my work.

In 2002 we submitted a paper to a geography journal on some of the research that I want to talk about in the first part of my talk this evening. When the reviewers comments arrived, one stood out in terms of the insights they offered and the generosity of the time that the reviewer had clearly taken thinking about our paper. Not only a critique of what we had presented but a clear sense of how we might redevelop our argument.

Like many of you here, I imagine, I've had my fair share of comments that are difficult, petty, infuriating, insert word or expletive as appropriate, but this was the very model of what the review process could and should be. The paper was so much better when we resubmitted it that

When it was accepted, I asked the editor if we could ask the anonymous reviewer who'd been so helpful for their name so that we could acknowledge them in their work. And this was of course Sylvia. And we were later privileged to have been asked to contribute to chapter to Sylvia's handbook of gender and poverty. And so I had the opportunity to meet her here at the LSE for the launch of the book and to join other contributors to talk around the ideas.

And I've always tried to keep Silvia's support and generosity in those reviewers' comments in mind wherever I act as a reviewer myself. And I hope I've managed. So today I want to revisit that project.

and the lessons I've learned about how, why and when people do or do not choose to act and how this has led to the ways that we then approached a more recent project on global health, as Claire said, work of over 25 years, which I'm kind of staggered to think that I can be standing here being one of those people who's talking about work over 25 years, but there you go.

And I'll conclude with a very brief reflection on what I think this means for how international development research could and should be done. So the first project

was in Wadi al-Aqi in southern Egypt. This project started in the late 1980s and it was a collaboration between South Valley University in Aswan and the University of Glasgow where I was at the time a lecturer. Well not in the 1980s, sorry, that project, that's more than 25 years ago. The project started before I joined the department.

I'm going to have to apologise for the quality of some of these slides. They're pre-digital and I've had to scan them in. So, Wadi al-Aqi, a wadi means the dry valley, a dry side valley of the Nile River. There was no rain in this part of Egypt in living memory and incredibly hardy vegetation that was of great interest to botanists and environmental chemists.

But this of course is a dynamic environment and Wadi al-Aq is here just coming off what would have been the Nile but it was transformed in 1970 with the high damp lake in Aswan creating Lake Nasser, Lake Nubia behind it. And because of this

unique environmental change, this unique sense of a dynamic environment. In 1990, Wadi al-Aqi was made a UNESCO Man in Biosphere Reserve.

the environment, as I say, completely changing with this water. Geographers of course would say that's not the right place for the dam, it should be in the highlands of Ethiopia where you've got nice deep valleys that would make more sense for water, but of course water is geopolitical as well as natural.

So initially, as I said, this was a very science-heavy project. It was dominated on both parts of the collaboration with soil scientists and botanists. And there was a sense that the people who lived in this landscape couldn't possibly have anything to contribute to the discussions about the evolving nature of the environment.

And there was a number of times that the scientists did sort of say, well, we understand about the plants. We understand about the material that they grow in. We don't really need to add local people. But there was growing recognition, of course, that Bedouin...

did have a unique environmental knowledge. They were able to survive in a landscape that to most of us looked entirely inhospitable. And so in the 1990s this project developed a social science dimension as well, led by my colleague at Glasgow who's now retired, John Briggs. It was very clear that Bedouin had an incredibly intricate knowledge of the environment and a very

careful management of the resources. And here, acacia, an acacia tree here wasn't owned by any one family. This would be a resource that was shared amongst many. And one family would have access to the materials, the leaves and sticks that fell from the tree naturally. Another would be able to take any fruits that fell. And this particular family had the right to what fell from the tree if you put a very long stick up into the branches

and gave it a waggle about. And so it was a very different sense of environmental protection than the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve, which was very much that Western notion of drawing a line around a particular territory and within you couldn't use any resources, outside you could do what you liked. This was a much more cyclical, a much more nuanced sense of the environment.

One day, as I'm constantly reminding him whenever I can embarrass him by saying this, John Briggs walked into my office and said, would you like to come to Egypt? I need a feminist, which is not the sort of thing if I don't know if anyone has met John Briggs. He's he's a good unreconstructed Yorkshireman. It's not the sort of thing he often said.

But this was in response to the fact that he talked quite a lot about Bedouin indigenous knowledges and of course myself and others in the department kept reminding him that in fact it wasn't Bedouin indigenous knowledges that he knew about from his work but men's knowledges because when visitors would arrive at the Bedouin encampments

there would be a great coffee ceremony for the men and the women would retreat into domestic parts of the household. And this was in around 1999, just when DFID was funding a lot of gender development projects. And so we got some funding to start looking at the gender differences in terms of environmental management between the men and women in these Bedouin communities.

And as was typical of a GAD gender development project, we had, we wanted to address the practical gender needs of working with women to improve the kind of material conditions of their day-to-day lives. And then strategic ones, to think about women's empowerment, to think about how these practical interventions could be used to support women's roles within the household.

And the great thing about looking over 25 years of research is reminding myself of all the fabulous people that I have worked with. So we have this team of people

working on this project. This is John in the bottom left. Dr. Hoda Yacoub, who's going to be reappearing in this story quite a lot, who was at the time doing her PhD in botany. Nabila Hamad, who's wearing purple in the middle picture, who is a master student, and Hoda and Nabila worked with me to speak with the women.

And then the two people who ran the project in Aswan, Professor Ahmad Bilal, who's sadly no longer with us, and his wife, Irina Springle, who is a world-leading botanist, and a

a Russian who'd learnt Arabic from a dictionary, so had an amazing, has an amazing vocabulary, but apparently the structure is a little lacking. And then the rest of the field team, including Ahmad, who was just a fabulous driver, getting around this environment. So John and his team, when they'd spoken to men, had said that sheep production was very much a male activity,

that women knew nothing about sheep. They knew very little about the environment because by this point women had taken advantage of the resources available from the lakes that had emerged and had become much less mobile than the men. The men still travelled long distances with their sheep herds looking for ephemeral grazing, taking sheep to market. They claimed that they understood about the environment

about the environment and the resources therein, and the women just stayed at home. Obviously we got a slightly different version of events when we sat with the women to talk about their role in household reproduction. The women did tend to be more sedentary and they were left with the old and the sick animals and the very young animals to look after as well as some of the... Am I speaking?

sorry my screen keeps going off but we're okay here um as well as the uh as well as the older members of the of the community and what women knew was they didn't have the same extensive understanding of the environment but they had really intensive understandings of the local environment around them and particularly the use of medicinal plants um for caring for the for the sick animals and people and so they learned they told us about things like um how they could soak

particular plants in water and make them more palatable for the animals. So they really did have a different sort of understanding of the environment than the menfolk. So what we aimed to do with our project was to understand as much as we could about the women's perceptions and their use of the environment around them. But then also to find a way through this project to support this livelihood.

And through our regular conversations with women, it turned out that the kind of things that were constraints for them was that they had very limited fodder options. The whole kind of having to soak particular plants to make them palatable was labor intensive, was exhausting, and obviously not great deal alternatives.

They limited fresh fruits and vegetables for their children. They were always very keen that we would bring them whenever we came from Aswan. And the difficulty of collecting medicinal plants. And we noticed that two of the women had set up small farms. And this did seem to us that this would be a perfect way of supporting women to reinforce their livelihoods.

The limitations for the women who were already farming was the availability of water, they had to carry buckets of water backwards and forwards, and a lack of available plants.

So we thought this would be perfect for us with our gender development project. We were able to buy a pump that could bring water longer distances and more reliably. And obviously we had a lot of botanists on the team who could talk to the women about the kind of plants that might thrive in this environment.

So we thought we'd come up with the most perfect gender development project. It was something that responded to the immediate gender needs of the people that were there, plus also that kind of strategic dimension that it would give women ownership of part of the household production. It would lead to empowerment. This is not what happened.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this talk with a project that went wrong, but I've learned more from this than the ones that went right. We had this great idea. We brought the pump. We spoke to the relatively wealthier women, and they said, no, we don't want to farm. Bedouin don't farm. No, we're not doing that. And we said, but what about these two women that are doing this already? They have these remarkable...

small gardens, they've got some farms, they've got a more reliable source of medicinal plants, they've got some small fruits. And we discovered that the women, the relatively wealthy women, pitied those who were doing this farming. And the most...

I suppose for me a quite devastating thing to find out was when we then went back to speak to these two women they were ashamed of doing this. They weren't the sort of empowered leaders in the community that I thought they were, it was absolutely the opposite. If they had the choice they wouldn't have, they wouldn't be doing this and this sort of caught me

short a little bit. So as I say, we've got... I'm trying not to have too much text tonight since it's a bit later in the evening, so I'm aiming for pictures, but a little bit of text. So there was most enthusiasm from those who had limited access to the wider environment, that they ended up having to do this not as a matter of choice, but as an action of last resort. The women themselves did not see themselves as empowered.

And so we thought this had not been successful. We felt we'd really misunderstood the situation. But what happened was that over time, over the next few months, gradually, one by one, the different households did come and get involved with this and did want to take their turn with the pump.

And within a year or so, every family in the communities we were working with had a farm. And we're very proud to show it to us or any other visitors as far as I could see when they arrived in the area.

I'm sorry, I should have said that the two who'd started this, it turned out, were widows. The ones who'd had their own gardens, their own small farms, we discovered were widows, and so didn't have men to take their animals to the market for them. And that was why they were in such a... They were in a more vulnerable position and had to take this activity. And it seemed that once those first two pioneers' gardens...

had been successful. There was two things that happened. There was a practical demonstration of success. This wasn't these strange people arriving and telling them, "Oh, you should try doing this. This will help you." This was something they could see. They could see how it could be incorporated into their own households. But I think more importantly, it was done in such a way that it wasn't challenging to women's roles.

accepted roles in the household. Women did have a key role, but it was seen very much as a household decision to embark on this activity. And this is where our exchange with Sylvia's reviewer's comments was so helpful, because she drew our attention to the concept of the patriarchal bargain from Denise Candioti. The idea that

it can be too risky for women to outright oppose patriarchal systems, outrightly sort of say, "Oh no, we want to do something differently." And also that women benefit from stability and protection in roles that could be perceived as being submissive. So rather than

being seen to challenge the established gender relations by gradually introducing the gardens and gradually the households deciding to make that move. It was seen as offering a material benefit to the household rather than women themselves. So that change was negotiated by working within this bargain. And so it seemed to us that agency

the ability of women to change was linked to perceptions of themselves, not as individual actors, of course, but as part of a household. And those women who headed households, the widows, or who are alone, could negotiate gender roles. But the most vulnerable women had to respond out of material need rather than choice. So it wasn't a simple path to empowerment. So at first, as I said, we were...

We weren't entirely sure whether this project had worked. It had worked in terms of the practical gender needs of supporting the material basis of each of these households, but not in terms of the question of empowerment. But again, with time, because this project continued, the GAD funding had finished, but

but we were still involved with this exchange with South Valley University. We continued to return to see the women. Things changed. So when we arrived to speak to the women in the women's areas, John and his team would go and speak to the men and talk about sheep with them. And we would go to the more private areas. And of course, all the children were there.

And I'm sure many people here have been involved in field work, and it can be quite challenging when lots of children all arrive and you're trying to sit down and have a conversation about sheep. And so we took it in turns, well, the field assistants took it in turns to sit with the kids with pieces of paper and crayons and things they were initially drawing. But increasingly they wanted to write things, they wanted to write their names. And so there was... We began to...

I guess, provide some very basic literacy for the kids. And there was more and more demand for this. And increasingly, the Bedouin women started to shape the direction of the project. They wanted more education for their kids. And then they asked for some literacy training for themselves.

And really, interestingly, then the men wanted literacy training too. They were convinced that if the women could read and write, they would petition for divorce, which I thought was a kind of interesting first step. In fact, the women told us that they wanted to be able to read medicine bottles particularly. But...

This is a picture from a day when we invited the Aswan governorate to come and see what was being done, to come and hear from the Bedouin about their desire for more education to try and get some funding for it. And later some of the women wanted to get involved with handicraft production as well, so they'd asked us if there was someone we could bring to help them take their products to market.

what started off feeling like the women were really quite passive and not engaging with the process, over time, as I said, they really started to shape the direction of the collaboration with South Valley University. Now, in the period after...

the attacks on the US in September 2001 and then American retaliation in the Middle East, it became increasingly difficult for us as outside academics to get permission to go to the desert and to continue with the fieldwork. And so it got to the point that we had to walk away from it. But the thing that I think is...

one of the best outcomes of the project is that it has continued. And Dr. Hoda Yacoub, who I mentioned at the beginning, who was doing her PhD in botany at the start of this project, became so involved with the women's works that she set up a women's NGO that was co-led by herself and others from Aswan and some of the Bedouin women. And they've continued to drive this forward. And I spoke to

to Hoda a couple of years ago. She's still leading this. She's actually the senior researcher for the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency, which is quite unusual in southern Egypt to have a woman in that role and is still pushing for supporting education. There's now a school running in the area and so forth.

It was a really interesting project in terms of challenging what I was anticipating and forcing me to think very differently about how a project like this might unfold. It seemed at the time that a lot of the language of participatory development, in fact Claire and I were talking about this just before we came in just now,

perhaps not as as as rigorous perhaps not as well theorized as it as it might have been it kind of emerged around this point there was a great enthusiasm for participation the department for international development as it was then and various other funders were very keen to to fund projects that that included participation that included sort of gender development type works or

bringing in indigenous knowledges but I don't think it was always very well thought through that sometimes it was a language of participation, it was a language of indigenous knowledge but it wasn't always embedded within practice and one of the things that

that we noticed when we were doing this work is that it's this graphic which was on the World Bank's Indigenous Knowledge and Development page at the time. It's since been taken down. But it just seemed to me that this kind of summarised everything that was wrong with some of these rather superficial approaches that didn't really provide the time and understanding for the complexity of...

understanding empowerment but also understanding the reasons that people participate or choose not to participate, how to bring in other ways of knowing and other ways of doing things. This just suggests that it's an entirely smooth process, that it's entirely without any sense of power relations, any sense of contradictions and that it's

It's almost a kind of sprinkling a little bit of local distinctiveness and that kind of makes business as usual work quite well or work a little bit better. So this is something that this project has stuck with me. Perhaps I was hopelessly naive when I started it, but I certainly was much less hopelessly naive at the end in terms of what I'd learnt from the Beding Women and Hoda in particular.

So we weren't able to continue working in Egypt and as a result of the work I'd done, I was invited to join a One Health project in northern Tanzania. And this started with a puzzle. A medic that was working in Moshe in northern Tanzania had noticed that of the people arriving at the big referral hospital in Kilimanjaro, lots of people were turning up with febrile illness, the kind of...

the range of symptoms that seem to capture so many diseases in the region, fever, headaches, joint pain, and they were being tested for malaria with quick tests

and often given anti-malarials, I think sometimes because they were the medications that were available and it was too big a risk to not treat for malaria. But people weren't getting better. And so this medic, John Crump, an American who was working in Tanzania at the time, he set up the gold standard tests and discovered that of all of these febrile illnesses that were being recorded as malaria, only 1.6 of them were actually malaria.

but a large chunk, the red pieces, were endemic bacterial zoonoses. And that's what he was interested in. I'm kind of slightly disturbed by the big blue bit that says unknown, but I think that's probably for a different discussion.

So he was very keen to find out more about where these bacterial zoonoses were coming from. Zoonoses, I think probably most people know what a zoonosis is now. When I started doing this research, it was very exotic. But post-COVID, we know an awful lot more about diseases that jump from animals to people. And so this was the puzzle. And he wanted to get together a team of researchers

medics, veterinary scientists, epidemiologists and social scientists to try and understand who was at risk, what people's understanding of this disease was and where there were points of infection in the community. He could obviously see just those people who'd made it to effectively the top of the medical pyramid in Tanzania, but what was the epidemiology of this in the community?

And so we started working on this and one of the things, and I don't know who all is in the room and the kind of research that you do, but one of the things that this work really brought home to me is the major challenge of interdisciplinary work is time scales. So we just started collecting all this fabulous focus group discussion material that we were translating and beginning to transcribe by which point the epidemiologists had analyzed everything and were moving on to the next project.

So we were beginning to make sense of this and then we had another opportunity which was a huge, I think it was about 20 million pounds that was being funded through a coalition of the UK research councils, DFID and the Department for Defence called Zoonosis and Emerging Livestock Systems and

This makes sense for the UK. This was pre-COVID, so I think it shows that they were thinking ahead, that this was thinking about where newly emerging diseases might come from and what kind of transformations in the wider environment might be driving these emergencies. And so we had a project which we called SEEDS, Social, Economic and Environmental Drivers of Zoonosis in Tanzania,

I've discovered that medics love an acronym. The follow-up to SEEDS, by the way, was called OOTS, which I think is the most Scottish acronym of all time. Anyway, so what we were trying to do is to understand in the context of northern Tanzania, what were the drivers of disease emergence and what were the risk factors for different diseases.

livestock keepers and how might there be interventions to help. And as I said, this was ahead of the COVID pandemic. It was something that the research councils here had as a priority. It's something that the government of Tanzania had as a priority too. It's one of the few, sorry, at that point, it was one of the few governments that was engaging with Zoonosis, was engaging with this as being a particular priority.

challenge and was adopting a One Health approach to addressing it. Whether it was a priority for the livestock keepers themselves, I'll come back to. So this is based on a One Health approach and if you've not come across this, One Health is the collaborative effort of multiple health science professionals together with their related disciplines and institutions working globally

locally, globally and nationally to attain optimal health for people, domestic animals, wildlife, plants and our environment, as the American Veterinary Medical Association One Health Initiative Task Force said in 2008. A recognition that health and disease are the result of interactions of people, animal and the environment and that multiple disciplines may be required to address the problems. As a geographer,

I kind of want to go, well, yeah, obviously. But this apparently was quite radical in the sciences. I think because the way I've always thought about it is a lot of medical research is quite decontextualised, that you kind of go to a clinic, you're a body that carries or represents the disease. Vets, I think, are much more like doctors.

sort of geographical social scientists in that they tend to go where the animals are and understand their context within the environment and within human health as well. But really interesting to see how some of the dynamics between disciplines work. So on the one hand I think this is a really positive step forward in terms of a kind of holistic approach to understanding health and new emerging challenges in health. But I...

I do worry about some of the similarities with the diagram that I finished up on a minute ago, that it's again a kind of fairly smooth space, or a smooth kind of conceptual space of things coming together. The very fact that you can separate human health, animal health and environmental health to then bring it together does suggest a kind of ontology that is...

is very Western enlightenment and perhaps not so responsive to the kind of ways that the livestock keepers that we were going to be interacting with would understand the world around them. And again, no sense of power dynamics or contradictions in these sorts of diagrams. The other thing that I think is slightly problematic is although

One Health suggests that it's about a kind of holistic approach to health. The way it's applied is generally towards specific diseases.

that it's not really about health in that positive sense, but it's a kind of negative. It's about stopping disease outbreaks. And the way that it's often used is to think about how do we stop transmission either between different animals or indeed that barrier between people and animals. Although these things are kind of presented as being equally important, the key thing is usually stopping transmission going into animals.

populations of people. And some critics, critical social science engagement with this concept have also suggested that that very logic means that there's a tendency to prioritize particular groups of people over others, that those power relations are so hidden.

And what this leads to, particularly whenever health is first conceived as the absence of disease, it's converted into a measure of the body's natural biological order. If it's not health in that kind of broad sense, it's okay, you don't have a particular disease, it makes it too easy for it to become normal.

primarily and overwhelmingly a biological condition removing attention from non-biomedical causes and contexts. And this is something that my colleague Alicia Davis and I have tried to work through and tried to think about how else we might conceive of One Health, which as you can imagine has ended up with some very, very complicated entangled diagrams which are nothing as coherent and lovely as these. But this tends to

lead to individualistic accounts of agency and it's something that Paul Farmer has written so brilliantly about in his work that he says that in medicine exaggeration of patient agency is particularly marked in the biomedical literature in part because of medicine's celebrated focus on individual patients which inevitably de-socializes and this is where I think the two projects really

really speak to each other in the way I've thought about them. So the individual patient is seen as the body that either carries the disease or doesn't and that makes better or worse decisions about protecting itself from that disease. And so much of the work we found that

was being implemented around One Health was around knowledge, attitude and practice style interventions. The idea that if you could just improve people's knowledge then their attitudes and practice would follow. They would therefore choose to do more healthy things and protect themselves. So this was the context of what we were doing. Something that was simultaneously quite exciting but also

I think problematic from the start. I'm going to quiz through some of the results. I'm happy to talk about them afterwards. This is where we did our field data collection in northern Tanzania, just towards the border with Kenya near Kilimanjaro.

And we had a multidisciplinary approach. This is, I asked the local Tinga Tinga painter to capture what we were doing, and this is the focus groups and the medic, and certainly there's no sense of a kind of passive nature in this picture. I think the, I'm not sure the

the vet is going to have any chance of treating that cow. I think it's got its own ideas. So we did a cross-sectional survey amongst different populations to find out their understanding of zoonoses, the practices that might be risky, the extent to which particular interventions would be appropriate and acceptable.

Again, a huge team collecting human and animal samples for testing. There was a huge household questionnaire and then focus group discussions and interviews. We even had to produce a new lab in Kilimanjaro Research Centre.

because you're not allowed to bring animal samples into a lab that deals with human samples so even at that level that has to be separated so we again got a sign made and i think we had to alter this because it was caribou zoonosis lab welcome to the zoonosis lab the the painter the caribou 200 noses lab which i think makes much more sense if you've not come across zoonosis before but um

And again, a huge team of people, as well as all the researchers that were involved in the project in terms of the data collection. As part of the whole Zoonosis and Emerging Livestock Systems funding stream, there was also a doctoral training center that brought together

students from the countries that we were working in and UK students and there was training activities. So there was a lot of resource and a lot of effort put into this approach of understanding emerging diseases through our project and I think there was another 12 or 13 funded as well.

And here we are the range of activities on the right hand side we would arrive at this is a small holder settlement and the table will be set up and the questionnaire done and samples taken from the animals. These would all be zero graze, these animals will be kept in the holdings here and on the left hand side we've got

pastoralist communities where we would also speak to folks, test their animals and themselves as well. And what we discovered, perhaps not surprisingly, is that it's pastoralists and their livestock who are most at risk from zoonotic infections, more so than those who are in smallholding situations. They face the highest levels of livestock abortion and productivity loss.

They were also the most poorly served in terms of access to health and veterinary services, and they had least knowledge about the diseases. Individualising accounts would of course just suggest that education needed to be prioritised, but because of the broader One Health approach, we realised that there were structural factors that meant that that alone would be insufficient. There was all sorts of...

the drivers that we were looking for in terms of the changing nature of animal health and human health. There was a decline in the growing season and an increase in frequency and persistence of droughts, so we can see that the growing season is limited, the mean annual temperature is rising, but most importantly

the rains became less and less predictable over the last 60 years or so and had become shorter and more intense, so less helpful in terms of growing and the availability of feed. At the same time, there'd been an increase in population

And we can see the dark line is the increase in the human population, the light line is in livestock units. And that was reinforced by what people were telling us when we were asking about the challenges to raising their cattle. The idea that sometimes only a few people in a village would have cattle now, everyone does.

everyone has a few livestock, it's increasing. So that more people and each person having a small number of cattle, it felt like the numbers were growing significantly. And we can see from Landsat images that the amount of land that was being used for croplands and therefore unavailable for livestock keepers

was becoming less and less. There is a difference in methodology between the second and third map there, so it's probably not quite such an extreme transition as that shows, but you can see the direction of travel there.

So livestock and wildlife policy drivers have the effect of reducing mobility for the livestock keepers and reducing access to grazing lands. On top of what we've just seen, there's also government being able to get money from tourist activities, tourist revenues.

And, of course, the tourists want to see the big five animals. They don't really want to see cows when they go on their safaris. And so the area available to nomadic peoples, to livestock keepers in northern Tanzania was becoming less. Pressure towards sedentarization was very similar in Egypt, actually. The government was...

always building houses for the Bedouin. When I say always, they occasionally built houses for the Bedouin which they were never keen to take advantage of. But support from the government here also for a shift to more of a monetary economy, providing access to social services and land security.

So when all this is combined, there's a reduced availability of livestock grazing areas in these semi-arid rangelands. So one of the things that we saw happening over this period is a shift from cattle to sheep and goats. And this may have implications in terms of the kind of zoonotic diseases that are transmitting because we've got a different, I suppose, a different border between animals and people because we've got more sheep and goats transmitting.

living around people than previously when it was predominantly cattle. That doesn't seem entirely clear in terms of what the implications are. But what is interesting, and culturally I think is more interesting, is that it became difficult for households to replace cattle when they died because of drought or disease because they're expensive and it was a risk.

to put all the resources into getting another cow if it wasn't going to survive the drought and the lack of grazing. And there was a sense from a lot of our focus groups that sheep and goats would just survive better. They can graze where cattle can't.

And this is significant because cattle were in the same way that sheep were important for Bedouin. That when we asked women in Egypt about, well, you know, is it important to have sheep? We were told, you know, a woman is blessed if she only has one sheep. Here,

cattle were seen as being more than just the kind of immediate value of having an animal around. In one focus group we said, I don't think any of us keep animals for the purpose of becoming rich, but animals are our insurance because they help us to solve problems

When raised, for example, if someone is sick at home or school fees are needed, then you can sell the animal and solve the problem that you face. So when a cattle is sick, the whole family is affected because the expected income will not be there. There really literally was a sense of them being kind of a mobile capital. And the economists...

on the team did an analysis and the level of livestock abortion was directly related to a decline in schooling for the communities involved. And I say just as with the Bedouin where animals were a blessing, not just things to be exploited, so too with Maasai pastoralists in particular, they were seen as a gift from God for human nourishment and wealth

but also as something that the Maasai were responsible for, that they had a kind of

almost a family relationship with the animals they each had a character they had names they were understood we were told when the animals are unwell or the environment is unwell then we are unwell there was that sense of not those three areas of life being separate but them being very much embedded together so

In terms of this kind of One Health approach, there was the emergence of these bacterial zoonoses that we were able to, that the scientists were able to find in the animal populations that were surveyed. And the obvious One Health solution would be vaccines. That you vaccinate the animals to stop those bacterial zoonoses leaping into the human population and control it that way.

I still remember the workshop that we had when we, it was our research project, but some of the others in other parts of the world as well that had been looking into zoonoses. And there was a great excitement among some of the attendees that the vaccines were going to solve the problem. And the social scientists were sitting looking rather gloomy and going, "Oh, I don't think this is going to work." And I'm slightly worrying that the role of critical social science is always to say, "Oh no, it's more complicated. It's not going to work that way."

But this was the reason that we thought that. There's of course the question, if we're going to roll out a vaccine, who's going to pay? And in Tanzania...

as a result of the structural adjustment policy rollout in the 1980s, health for both humans and animals has become privatised. There is an expectation that the livestock keepers would have to pay for their vaccinations. For those of you who know Tanzania, it was really interesting the number of times when we were talking about responsibility, we were talking about the role of the state, there was a real sort of romantic...

Looking back to the days of Julius Nyerere, when there had been a sense that the government cared about the population and that would ensure that health services were available to all. But what we got was people having to make decisions about their livestock. One said to us, I have four goats.

Three cows and six pigs. I will vaccinate only the cows and leave the others because I don't have the money to vaccinate all the animals at once. So decisions were not being made in terms of the relative risk of the disease going to particular animals, but the relative importance of the animals to the household. Cattle were the most important culturally, economically to them.

But even if the vaccines were to be provided for free, we weren't convinced that there would be wholesale engagement with them. And there was all sorts of anxiety about the livestock doctors, the local livestock officers or the medical supplies available to livestock keepers.

they would often compare the livestock provision, livestock health provision today with what they got in the past. And they were now too business oriented. It was all about money. And they didn't really always believe that what was being injected was up to date, was actually medicine. And of course, stories of unscrupulous business like vets kind of flowed around the communities.

And I think part of this was an uncertainty about health, about having the ability and agency to act. There was a certain degree of fatalism. We were told that in nature there are diseases that are natural for animals. If it's time for the animal to get the disease, then it will get it. It's kind of like God will decide. And another was almost a deferral to experts.

And we would ask people, you know, are you in good health? Are your animals in good health? And something that initially surprised me was how many times people said, I don't know.

I don't know if I would have to be checked at the hospital to be sure. And we wondered if this might be a kind of holdover from HIV/AIDS and not knowing until the test was done what their fate was. But I think this really challenges the assumptions of the biomedical approaches, that when someone is sick they will know and they will feel empowered to act. And I remember the...

with our very first kind of launch meeting and everyone was standing up and kind of pitching their contribution to the project, what they were going to be doing. And I said, well, you know, what I really want to do is to try and understand agency. And this was a term that my science colleagues had not come across. I was accused of using jargon and just sort of say, well, you know,

raising these questions as to when someone would feel that they were able or entitled to take action. And part of this, I think, is a particular issue with the particular zoonosis that we are looking at. Because these create chronic conditions rather than a kind of dramatic...

dramatic cause and effect. It's not a case that you eat something tainted and then you clearly have gut problems, or your animal has gut problems the next day. This can be quite a long, slow process in terms of the diseases taking hold. And, of course...

Unlike the One Health approach, in terms of managing the day-to-day health of the families, the livestock keepers are not thinking about avoiding a particular disease. They are thinking about health more generally. And one of the things that we did right at the beginning of the focus groups, before we'd got everyone...

and informed about all of the scientific samples so they knew exactly what we wanted to do, we sort of sat down and asked them about what their health concerns were. What are the things you're concerned about? What are the biggest health challenges that you face each day? What are the health issues that you worry about in terms of your animals? And...

surprise, surprise, these zoonoses didn't appear as a top priority. In certain areas, very close to where there'd been a test of the brucellosis vaccine, there was a little pocket of people who were able to talk about brucellosis. But on the whole, the kind of things they were talking about was, oh, good health means I can get up and I can work. And if my animals have shiny fur and they're able to walk around, that's...

that means that they're healthy. And so their decision-making was, again, much more complex. But in those conversations that we had, these more general conversations, something else did emerge, which was...

of course I'm not a medic and I kept saying to Sarah Cleveland who was the epidemiologist on this project, I kept saying people are talking about their goats being dizzy. Am I misunderstanding this? Am I mishearing this? But it turns out there is a disease that the zoonoses in emerging livestock systems

grant funder people weren't interested in and the government of Tanzania I don't think knew an awful lot about but the livestock keeper certainly did and this was a thing called co-neurosis or or Milo is the way that that is called in in Ma and it's basically a parasite that works its way into goats brains and causes them to to become dizzy and it's it's fatal there's nothing that can be done and

It's a very clear cause and effect. And then it continues into the environment. The brains tend to be given to dogs to eat, and then they defecate, and the parasites are back into the environment for other goats to eat later. And this was a real concern for the local livestock keepers. That kept coming up. And so what we...

we started doing was talking with the livestock keepers about what could be done. And so in a sense we were able to turn the project upside down instead of starting from the diseases that were the concern for the big international funders, okay let's think about what you would be able to do in terms of these particular diseases, what sorts of

what agency do you have in terms of blocking that transmission? And here we've got one of the livestock keepers with their proposal for how we could intersect, we could break that chain of infection by burning the brains rather than passing them onto the dogs. And that seemed to us a really nice way to start having a wider discussion about livestock health and about the relationship between livestock health and human health. Then COVID hit.

just as we were rolling this out, and then the funding was cut, as again I'm sure some of you experienced around the same time that there was a kind of clawing back of money from the GCRF fund. We were told it was going to come back later, but of course when you've got the team, where did my, oh yeah, when you've got that huge team of people working with us,

they can't just kind of wait until the UK research councils decide that they're going to return to funding this. But I think just with the Egypt project, it highlights the importance of an understanding of the power relations and structural factors that limit agency, that limit even the thought of agency being possible.

and a recognition of the multiplicity of experiences and pathways through which different actors decide that they will choose to act and want to act in particular contexts.

The real importance, I think, that has emerged from my 25 years of experience is the significance of long-term partnerships, that none of these insights would be possible in the short term. It has to involve trust. It has to involve long-term collaborations. And I'm sorry to end with such a pessimistic note, but I fear for that. I'm going to stop there.

I'm going to move off that slide there for a bit. I'm not having that behind me. Thanks, Jo. That was fantastic. You're welcome to come and sit down if that's more comfortable for you. Thank you, Jo. So we're going to open to questions. We've got about 25 minutes or so for both online and in the room. So if you can raise your hand and

we've got roving microphones that we can bring to you and if you could just say your name and your affiliation briefly before posing your questions for joe so do we have any immediate questions that people we have one at the front here hi i'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome lse podcast that we think you'd enjoy

Thank you, Professor Zhou. It was a very insightful talk.

So my question is regarding the first part of your talk. So over the 25 years of very deep ethnographic work, did you observe any transition in agency between generations? So did younger women experience agency differently from how the older women did? And did migration have any role to play in terms of migrating either because of environmental factors or for aspirational factors for younger women?

That's a really interesting question. And there was certainly, when we had the discussions initially about the farms and the gardens, it was the older women tended to speak and the younger women tended not to speak out at that point. And to be honest, I don't know who then took...

the leading role in terms of the household rollout of the farms from there. I'm trying to think from my last conversation with Huda if she'd

I imagine that there would be, but I'm not able to answer that. And in terms of migration, there wasn't a great deal of migration in or out of that community at the time. Now I have heard, again from Huda, because I've not been able to go to that region for a very long time, the last time I spoke with her, Huda, I had her on the end of the line as she was speaking to one of my classes, and there have actually been quite a lot of changes amongst the community.

I did ask her if she felt that we had been part of that process because I mentioned slightly flippantly earlier that the Egyptian government would have been quite keen for Bedouin to settle, sorry this is a very long way around to answer your question, for them to become more sedentary and they had occasionally built houses for them which they

inevitably put their animals in and they continued to camp outside but Hoda was saying that some of the Bedouin were now using those homes and the education provision had become more formalised so

But my understanding is that there isn't a great deal of movement in and out of that particular community. There's more outsiders coming to take advantage of the resources around the high dam lake. There's quite a lot of fishing and mining. But I don't think that involves women so much. I think those are men that generally come. So that's a long way around for saying I don't know. But it's a really interesting question. I could kind of hypothesize, but I think probably best not.

Do you have more questions for Jo? I have a question about where you finished with interdisciplinarity and you said that what you'd kind of learned through your experience was about the significance of long-term collaboration. Can you say a little bit more about that? What do you think is kind of best practice there? I think it was just as much the fact that

I would love to see a change to the way that research grant funding is provided. Again, Claire and I were talking about this beforehand because we both recently had enormous research grants. So that Zells grant we got for, I think it was four years, was 2.4 million. It was

This is going to sound like a ridiculous thing to say because we're always complaining we don't get enough money. It was too much money, all to be used in a short period of time. And we were not as efficient as we were with the smaller grant that we had first when we were kind of exploring and we had a bit more freedom, to be honest. I mean, Sarah and myself ended up doing an awful lot of kind of managing rather than researching.

what I would really love to see is a commitment for a smaller amount of money for 10 years instead of a lot of money for a shorter amount of time. And that's what we used to have. So the Egyptian project was funded by the Academic Links Scheme. It was operated by the British Council, but it was FCO money, I think. And I don't know if anyone else in the room benefited from this, but this was...

I think it was about three or four thousand, this is all pre-full economic costing, but it was I think about ten thousand pounds a year. And that was to establish meaningful collaboration between a UK department

and somewhere in the south, however defined. And it was enough money to have a couple of people go from one side to the other, as it were, to provide for training, to provide for exchange, and to develop research. Now, the government always hated this because it was completely uncontrollable. There were so many of these little projects all over the place, and they...

they didn't quite follow, I mean there weren't as many rules because it was a small amount of money, they didn't control it quite so much. But, and occasionally they tried to get this shut down. Every time they tried to cancel it, they obviously got reviews of the efficiency of this. And it always came across as being the most efficient way

part of international development funding and research because of the multipliers that it produced. But what it meant was that, I mean, you couldn't be absolutely guaranteed it would roll on, but as long as you were being active and you were producing the right kind of outcomes, then you would continue to get it for a decent period of time. And what that meant is that relationships of trust emerged that just isn't possible in the short term. And so...

with the Egypt Project when it first arrived I mean

I was always very conscious of the fact that I wanted to have a genuine discussion with Hoda and Emila about how we unfolded this research. But I had to kind of watch my role as well because I still remember some of the early meetings that we would go in to see Ahmed Bilal to talk about research. And I would talk about what the gender team was going to do. And he would look at John and say,

So what are we going to do? Because there was a particular way of thinking about gender roles within the project as well as within the community that we were working with. And one of my proudest moments in that project was when, a few years later, Ahmed stood up and said he was proud to introduce Huda to speak about the gender work because this was the most important project that was running out of that collaboration. And that was something that just over time we were able to kind of...

establish with each other the value of what we each brought to the research and

I really want, I mean, projectitis is something we talk about a lot in international development and I think it's as significant in research work as it is in terms of development work on the ground. And I just think it's impossible to do this properly. And, you know, in Tanzania we were really lucky to have two or three grants go back to back so we were able to, you know,

to train the research assistants again there weren't a lot of trained social scientists as in Egypt so we were able to work with some master students that were able to end up running some of the focus groups that takes time to set up the

the lab for the animal samples. And again, just so that we understood the language we were using. I mean, I thought agency was such a straightforward term. And I spent months with colleagues trying to explain that in the same way they were trying to explain to me the life cycle of some of these pathogens.

Yes, so the problem also is the different timescales of different parts of the work. We're still going through the qualitative data and the scientists are on to a completely different project now. And I would just love to see more of that kind of long-term investments in partnerships. And when the partnership project, the Academic Link scheme, finally was closed, I think it was about 2008,

I've never seen so much fury amongst colleagues because it was such a small amount of money that was being taken away and yet it was something that was so important in terms of the way we do research. And that's my rather pessimistic final slide. I don't see that changing in the near future.

Can I just follow up on that point that you just made about explaining agency within the team? I mean, you're a geographer. It's really fascinating to hear you talk about this. I mean, this is really interdisciplinary. We're not just talking about different social science disciplines, but completely different ways of thinking about research. So how...

I mean, what sort of things did you have to kind of learn yourself to be able to communicate what seemed to be a basic idea to you within that kind of really interdisciplinary environment?

I think it's a really good practice, actually, because you have to... You can't really fall back on jargon. Right. I have to say, I wasn't really thinking that agency was jargon, but it's about being very clear and about really thinking about what you mean by it. And just...

It's been a fantastic team to work with actually. We're moving the enthusiasm with which my colleagues, I say particularly Vets, Vets are absolutely my favourite scientists because they're field scientists and really understand the complexity of factors that impact upon health I think.

But introducing the idea of the bio-social or syndemics or the kind of work that Paul Farmer does to see disease as primarily a social issue rather than being a biological issue

Being able to talk through some of that has been fascinating and it just forces me to be clear. But, you know, I love... My favourite bit of this job, I think, is teaching. So if I can't explain it to my students, I'm not going to be able to explain it to other scientists. So, you know, it's good training, I think. We have a question online, so let's go there.

We have a question from Kathy McElwain. Many thanks for the great lecture. I was wondering if you could say more about different types of empowerment: individual, collective, liberal, liberating. Wow. Yes, so I'm not sure I can necessarily... I'm going to look at you. I know you're not the person who asked the question. I'm not sure I can quite break it down into all four.

but I think the key difference there is between sort of liberal and collective. So the kind of liberal model of empowerment, which it seemed to me at the time that we were doing that gender development work that there was...

there was a real sense of an enthusiasm for participation, for empowerment, for a recognition that we shouldn't be doing development to communities, but this is something that should be, I mean, we would now talk about being co-production. And yet, for those of you who know that brilliant book by Cook and Kothari, The Participation in New Tyranny, there was that kind of an enthusiasm to

to use the language of participation but not necessarily to really dig down into what that might mean in terms of empowerment. So participation kind of assumes I think that everyone's sufficiently empowered to know why they're participating and what they're getting from it and why they're acting with the project. But

I think if there isn't that understanding as to why people are participating, then I don't think it is empowerment. I think it's empowerment in name only. And I don't think it does fundamentally change any relationships. And I think there's endless examples of projects where it's almost like tick box.

And in fact at one point with the gender development applications it literally was tick box. You had to tick that you had a certain number of women involved in the project, you had to tick that you'd identified some participatory mechanisms, but there was no sense of where the participation came in and could be kind of added in at the end. And so I think empowerment was something that was seen as resulting too straightforwardly from

a project that was deemed to be participatory without thinking about why people would act and why people sometimes wouldn't. And I think that's why that example of the Bedouin women worked so well because it was a sense of, well, it's just failed. These women are not empowered. These women are powerless.

And yet that's not the case at all. It was just that their empowerment had to come from them on their terms and not necessarily as individuals. This is why I can't quite divide it into the four parts. I think the expectation of kind of liberal empowerment was the individual woman would see what's best for them and go for it.

Whereas understanding it in a more nuanced way and in a more collective way was that it had to emerge from women as being part of a household, women as being part of a community, and how to negotiate that. I don't think I've done a brilliant job of answering that, but I think I'll stop because I think there was another question. Yeah, there was one at the back and then I'm here.

Thank you for the lecture. It's very interesting to get all the insights into your projects and also research, especially with the stenosis in times after COVID, I think, gained real attraction. I was wondering with climate change and, let's say, a decreasing availability of resources, for example, droughts, have you encountered in your research project in Egypt

like experiences where there was a shortage in resources and people had to decide how to allocate between, let's say, the gardening and the cattle or livestock and how, if you had any experiences or if you can see from what you've done in your research, how would you say that changed the distribution within the household and also the bargaining power and the agency of the subjects?

And then I was also wondering, you mentioned that widowed women were more open to the gardening experience in the beginning and then other women would follow suit. How such a shortage would affect the relation among the women in the community based on their relationship status as some are experiencing more distributional conflict than others?

Can we just take the other one as well? Oh my goodness, I'm never going to remember all of those. No, you can go ahead. I'm going to start with the end because my brain is beginning to shrivel up. But I think the... Actually, no, I'll take the whole together. In terms of Bedouin, I mean, the resource that was limited previously was water, and that was the resource that drove, I mean, initially for them to be...

to be nomadic was that they would follow the availability of... It didn't rain, so it was about finding... There was aquifers, water sources that they would move between. And then when the lakeshore retreated, there would be ephemeral grazing, and that's what the men would take the...

the sheep too. And we were not ever told about conflicts over that, which I was always really surprised about because it seemed to me that there was such limited grazing. And this is where our frustration with the way that the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve was

was drawn, came from because that was, let's say, this very static Western notion of conservation that you draw a line around an interesting environment and that would be protected and all else wouldn't be. What we discovered, the Bedouin, because there was three different clans that we were working with in that area, that they had, there was a real sense of spatial distinction between them, that as the lake shore moved, and this is why it's in the wrong place, that with every metre

of increase or decrease in the height of the Haidam Lake, you could have up to a kilometre movement of the shoreline because it's so shallow there. And it was movable, the territories of each of the three clans moved. They kind of sort of flowed with the water as it went, as it moved backwards and forwards. And we didn't hear about conflicts.

over that resource. And then in terms of the gardens, the provision of the pump meant, I mean, there was plenty of water, it was just getting it to the gardens, to the farms, and the pump allowed that to happen. And again, we weren't told of any conflict over resources there.

It was a different question in Tanzania because there's tension between farmers and livestock keepers on one hand, and then the desire of the government of Tanzania to have foreign exchange through tourism and control over those landscapes. What was the first question? Sorry.

Or the middle one. I think I've answered two. The last part of the question was how if resources would be scarce and water, you said there was an availability, but in a scenario when people would actually have to decide whether to do the gardening or not in a household bargaining situation, how that is on one side affecting bargaining power and agency in the household, but also how the relation among women would change if some had to give up gardening because

they needed the water for something else while others... Yeah, so my understanding is that that hasn't happened because as you saw from the map there's plenty of water there that the lake doesn't dry up.

and so it's just getting it to the gardens. And the water was seen as a community resource. The pump didn't belong to anyone, one family, but it was something that was shared. And that has continued. There has been some tensions between Bedouin and some of the incomers that have come. There's been some agriculture,

way after my time, hearing from Hoda, there's now some agriculture not done by Bedouin but by incomers. And again, because there's plenty of water, they're able to provide that. But there was concern that Bedouin animals were getting sick from pesticides being used on the water. So I have not been aware of any tensions around resources in that respect. Thanks, Jo. We have a question.

Thank you very much for your talk and for sharing all the different dimensions of your research. I thought that the talk also resonated for me in terms of bridging what you talked about and how you presented with the work of Sylvia Chand.

in many ways, but one of the ways that it resonated and the bridge was through the pictures. And Sylwia often used a lot of pictures in her teaching and in research. So I wanted to ask what images and what pictures do in your research? Is it an archive? Is it an object of research? Is it part of the analysis that you use? So methodologically, do the pictures, what role do they play? Thank you.

Oh, that's such an interesting question. And I've just not thought about that enough. I think it's interesting. I was digging back through my pictures for this because it's been... Until recently, I've not talked about the Egypt work for some time. Partly, I was just trying to...

I'm trying to find some images that weren't going to look rubbish when blown up. But it really did start to feel like an archive when I was looking at it. I hadn't thought about it until you asked that question. And particularly because there's been a lot of change in that landscape since I was there. And I would love to sit down with Huda and talk about the changes since that point, because

I think that landscape is going to look quite different now. I'm slightly conscious of overly aestheticizing some of this research as well.

I was told last week by someone who was one of my colleagues who was sitting in on one of my classes to give peer feedback that, oh goodness, there's such an aesthetic to your slides. And I was thinking, is that a good thing? And I do worry, I do think I need to think more about that.

I like to use a lot of images because in some respects I'm quite an old-fashioned geographer that I think place matters and having a sense of what that place looks like matters but obviously these are very much images from my perspective rather than the people that I'm working with on the ground and it would be we haven't actually done photo voice or anything like that I'm

I'm sort of in two minds about whether that's a useful methodology but maybe that would be something that would be helpful in terms of how I represent some of these communities. I need to think about that, thank you. If it's quick, one more question. Just quickly.

Hi, Jake Svage. I'm a PhD student here and sort of disenchanted former development practitioner. And I think between sort of research, development research and development practice, to me there's kind of this gap in empowerment that you talked about a bit before. How likely, I guess being a short question, how likely are we to bridge that gap? Is there a positive road ahead for more empowered development practice?

Sorry, just before you give the microphone back. When you say more develop, where are you seeing the impairment? Is that in the... So I guess like more people's voices coming through, more stuff that challenges kind of hegemonic ideas of what development is and kind of projects that are more responding to what's being said on the ground by people rather than sort of donors...

So until very recently, I would have given you a very optimistic answer, I think, because I genuinely do think there's a move in the right direction. It is slow and it is patchy, but I think so many of us are engaging with questions around post-colonialism and decolonial theories that are making some of...

Some of the work that we, sorry, some of the work I've been involved with in the past, I'm now uncomfortable with exactly how it's been done, perhaps to do with images and so forth. And certainly if I were starting my career now with that project in Egypt, I would be doing it in a very different way based on what I've learned since. And so I think there is a genuine...

a genuine shift and I think also there's I think Covid has been a double-edged sword and I think in some respects it's been quite helpful we had a workshop in I think May 2020 which was with various NGOs and Scottish based NGOs that were working particularly Malawi because there's a very strong connection between Scotland and Malawi and

because of COVID, it had to be virtual. And that meant that some of the Malawian partners could be present in a way that they wouldn't otherwise. And we heard how empowering that was for the partners. But also someone said, and now you're forced to trust us.

You have to send us the money. We don't have to wait for you to jet in and arrive. We're actually being empowered through this. And I thought it was a really interesting moment, and obviously not what we were necessarily expecting. And I think some of the budget cuts since COVID, but I think also some of the discussions around the whole kind of decolonial imperative, but also around sustainability,

I think of are beginning to force the change of mindset. Certainly in my university, we're thinking about having much less travel and particularly I think by senior people,

I keep saying that, it doesn't make me very popular, but by senior people and allowing, having the resources for early career folk to spend significant chunks of time in the field, making sort of genuine, again these kind of genuinely collaborative links, and not having the professors jetting in for a meeting for three days in a luxury hotel and then leaving. I think these sorts of things can actually be really helpful.

And I really did feel there was that movement. What's happened in the last few months really raises questions over exactly where we're going and who of us gets to decide that. I think there had been that kind of groundswell of moving in the right direction and I feel that that might be curtailed.

We are out of time, so I'm sorry to end on that note. I was going to say something about Sylvia. That was a better moment to finish, wasn't it, with the kind of images and being reminded of Sylvia's amazing photographic archive. So it just remains for me to thank you very much, Jo, for this fantastic talk, and thank you all for being with us online and in the room. Thanks very much. Thank you. APPLAUSE

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