If there is any one trait that economic geographers have, it is a tendency to navel gaze a wee bit more than economists (note: what some may call navel gazing others may call a search for relevance). This is certainly not the only, nor the most important, difference between the two. In this fine tradition, I am co-organizing a panel with my friend Danielle Labbé from the University of British Columbia. The panelists have been asked to offer reflections on the ethics of doing economic research during a time of crisis. I have been interested in this topic throughout my fieldwork, as I have found that many of my ‘informants’ have much better things to do than respond to my silly questions regarding economic activities that they are no longer pursuing. There are also methodological questions – what, for example, do you do as a researcher when your boom market goes bust part way through your dissertation?

Information regarding the session below. To be held at this October’s CCSEAS Conference in Vancouver.

Title: Roundtable on research in economic crisis

Abstract:

This roundtable aims to bring together people who have been actively pursuing research in Southeast Asia over the past year and who would like to speak to the methodological and ethical issues that they have encountered conducting research in a time of economic crisis. The roundtable welcomes reflections on how the crisis has impacted research questions, changed methodological approaches, or repositioned research project in an ethical sense.

Organizers:                       Danielle Labbe and Jim Delaney
 
Chair/Moderator:         Danielle Labbe
 
Participants:

Jim Delaney, University of Toronto

“Prices, what prices? I don’t sell anything anymore!”: studying boom markets during a time of collapse.

During this outset of my research on the commodity chain for bamboo in Vietnam, all of my questions were premised on bamboo being a boom crop. The world credit crisis and subsequent crash in the American houseing market brought bamboo floors and sideboards – my two major case studies – crashing down. This presentation reflects on the changes that this has wrought to my own research, not simply in terms of adapting my research questions but also my approach to research itself. Mass layoffs, cancelled orders and reconfigured (often severed) relationships between various actors on the chain have forced me to be more humble, and somewhat slower, in approaching my research.

Jean-Pierre Collin and Julie-Anne Boudreau, INRS,
Conducting qualitative research in a period of fear: Taking the economic crisis and pandemic risks into consideration

One of the most important characteristic of qualitative research is that it is based on human contacts involving often complex emotions. The researcher and the researched (and sometimes the line is more blur between the two) engage in a relationship entangled in power relations and filled with efforts on both sides to understand the codes and language of the other. This relationship varies in intensity according to the time spent together (from deep involvement in ethnographic methods, to short encounters in directed interviews). This human contact is based on the ability to read the affective life of the other. In times of uncertainty, some emotions dominate over others, fear being a very strong example. The experience of fear tends to blur the experience of other emotions. In times of economic crisis and pandemic threats, fear is very present, both for the researcher and the researched. It pervades and biases their human contact with one another. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork in Hanoi, these remarks ponder on the forms fear takes in the face of global uncertainties such as the economic crisis and pandemic and environmental risks. It looks at it from the point of view of the researcher as well as the researched. It also explores how fear changes the kind of data collected and the ethical manner in which the researcher must navigate fieldwork.

Adam Lukasiewicz, York University
Glocal uncertainties: Conducting research into local remittance-economies during a time of global economic recession

The recent global economic crisis has had far-reaching impacts upon labour-sending localities in the global South. In this presentation I will discuss how the return of laid-off migrants impacts perceptions of job opportunities among those in their communities. The site of my fieldwork is Lucban, a small farming town in the rural Philippines. I will argue that although the number of returning migrants laid off due to the economic crisis were small in numerical terms, their influence in shaping the trajectories of future migrants may continue to be substantial well into the future. Fieldwork was conducted from June 2008 through to March 2009.

To Xuan Phuc, University of Toronto
The challenges of doing commodity chain study on wood products in the economic downturn.

In general, I would like to discuss some difficulties I had when I interviewed VN wood processing companies in Laos during the global economic downturn. When I was there, some of them had to scale down their operation, some had to shut down completely, some looked for different types of supports. The commodity chain framework focuses on the question “who benefits” does not make a lot of sense here, as the “snap-shot” type of commodity chain study in this context is heavily distorted by the crisis. This shows the weakness of commodity chain framework

Discussant : Terry McGee, University of British Columbia

The writing has been on the wall for years, but the closure of FEER is still sad. What was once a great news magazine become a sub-par business journal (or something…could never quite figure out what) and is now gone for good.

FT.com / Media – Far Eastern Economic Review to close.