Okay it is 12:30 so I'm going to welcome everybody and begin.
So hello everybody, I'm Dr. Maria Elisa Christie. I'm the director of Women and
Gender in International Development at the Center for International Research,
Education and Development here at Virginia Tech. Shriya Sathaye, over there, with the
same backdrop as me, is the graduate assistant that's supporting this discussion series and
she's a grad student at the School of Engineering here at Virginia Tech. So welcome to our hybrid
Women and Gender and International Development Discussion Series. This is our second event of
the semester. I see we have Bernice Owusu-Brown, who was our first speaker in person and hybrid
down there. We're very happy you could join us for the discussion featuring Jennifer Langill,
who you will hear from soon. As of this morning we had 22 people registered for today's event so
in addition to many diverse folks from Virginia Tech we have people who join us from Nairobi and,
I see that she checked in here, and so please do put in put your check in in the in the chat so we
can we can see, but I'm going to just mention some of the some of the folks that joined,
so from Nairobi that's from the Kenya it's a gender environment specialist
from Kenya from the regional center for mapping of resources for development,
different US universities such as Duke and Iowa State and also an NGO Course International. So
welcome to everybody and I hope everybody is able to join that signed up. So please note
that our event will be recorded and available on our website later so for the zoom participants by
staying on now you're consenting to be recorded, you can turn off your camera and turn turn off
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recognize their continued relationship with their lands and waterways. We further acknowledge that
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Through sustained transparent and meaningful engagement with the Tutelo / Monacan Peoples
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increasing indigenous student staff and faculty recruitment and retention, diversifying course
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We also must recognize that enslaved black people generated revenue and resources used to establish
Virginia Tech and were prohibited from attending until 1953. Through inclusive VT the institutional
and individual commitment to Ut Prosim (that I may serve) in the spirit of community diversity
and excellence we commit to advancing a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community.
Okay, some brief housekeeping notes: so the event as the slideshow explained,
will last approximately 45 minutes that's Jennifer's presentation will be about 20-25
minutes and then followed by 20 to 25 minutes of question and answers. All of the participants
joining via Zoom will be muted to enable the speaker to present without interruption and
after the speaker's presentation people can raise their hands through the the virtual button and we
will ask you to unmute yourself to talk directly to the speaker or you can post your comments or
and questions at any time in the chat box and I will be collecting those on a Google doc and can
read them out so if you don't want to raise your hand and and bring them up yourself,
so but please wait for your turn to speak so that we can avoid interruptions and maintain
netiquette, isn't that a crazy new word, okay, not that new anymore. All right so in order
for our discussion to be as rich as it can we need everyone to be respectful and treat all
participants with kindness and consideration without discriminatory behavior so again the
webinar is being recorded and you will have access to it via our website. In advance,
I'd like to ask you to please answer the survey that we will put into the chat and
also email to you at the end, and you can tweet us or X us by tagging us @WGD VT.
Okay now you really want to hear about Jennifer and from Jennifer. So to introduce Jennifer
Langill, she's currently a doctoral fellow with the Department of Geography at McGill
University in Canada. I've been lucky to work with Jenifer on a special issue for Gender,
Place and Culture on feminist geographies of livelihoods which she is guest editing together
with Dr Ann Oberhauser of Iowa State University. Jennifer's work falls at the intersection of
feminist geographies and critical development, drawing on feminist approaches to livelihoods
and political ecology. She's specifically interested in the relationship between
social and political marginalization livelihood activities and individual life worlds. Her current
doctoral research examines intergenerational livelihood transition transitions for Hmong
populations in Northern Thailand and the intersectional outcomes of these political,
economic and environmentally driven changes. Her first publication from this research was recently
published in Gender, Place and Culture and I think we're gonna, if you are okay with that Jennifer,
we're going to put that PDF into the chat. yes. okay, so prior to this Jennifer studied
human environment relations in the Peruvian Amazon specifically flooding gendered season livelihood
seasonality and environmental change for flood plane communities. She's also consulted for the
alliance of Biodiversity International and the International Center for tropical agriculture
on gendered migration and land restoration in Burkina Faso. So I just want to add that
Jennifer is really a rockstar, we are excited to have been able to work for her with her for
these last like four years as we did the feminist livelihood sessions at the association American
Association of Geography conference and she's got just really interesting publications so thank you
so much for joining us and she still hasn't graduated with her PhD and she's doing all
these amazing things! So thank you! The title of her talk is gender Transformations Embedded and
Livelihood Transitions: Changes and Continuities in Hmong Gender Roles and Relations in Northern
Thailand. So now it is your turn so if you want to share your yeah and I will mute myself.
Hi everyone. could someone give me a thumbs up if you can hear me okay, perfect, and you can see my
screen, wonderful. Well hello everyone and thank you very much for being here and thank you in
particular to Maria Elisa for inviting me and for the introduction. I had the privilege of attending
the Women and Gender in Development conference at Virginia Tech in 2019 so it is wonderful to
be back in this space, even if virtually, and I appreciate the invitation to join you today. I
am excited to share a paper from my dissertation with you that focuses on the inter relationships
between changes in gender roles and relations and so-called processes of development. Conceptually
this paper draws on long-standing feminist critiques of development including development
theory, development practice and development as a concept in and of its own. Feminist critiques
of development have created a wealth of empirical and conceptual contributions including the gender
particularities within local contexts, gendered economies including gendered labor distributions
and gendered access to capital in other assets as well as gender outcomes of development and forms
of change. While I focus on gender in particular as a sight of difference in this talk I also want
to highlight important intersectional and postcolonial work on multiple interlocking
subjectivities that are always at play within and beyond gender systems. Despite decades
of important feminist critique of development with particular focus on gender as a key site
of social difference, gender still remains overly marginalized in development studies and I think
we can likely all agree to this limitation given the fact that we're all together today. So why
is that? Why is gender repeatedly marginalized despite its proven importance time and again?
Even with a multitude of important interventions made by feminist development scholars and critics,
I would suggest that most gender and development research tends to fall into one of two categories
the first being the gendered context of inequality and poverty and the second being the gendered
outcomes from development interventions or economic change. Deeper insights into gender
as process interwoven with so-call development remain a challenge. This is the entry point of
this paper as I try to better understand gender not as context to or outcome from development but
integral at every stage I examine gender roles and relations in particular. I want to clarify here
that I view gender as one of many important forms of social difference, I am personally interested
in decolonial and postcolonial intersectionality and I've recently published on this from the same
research project which is the the paper that was just shared in the chat and in this presentation I
am exploring gender specifically but that is not to suggest gender to be a singular or isolated
one with difference. I will briefly contextualize my study site for this research which is based in
Hmong village in Northern Thailand. There are currently over four million Hmong individuals
living across the Southeast Asia Massif. Hmong are an ethnic minority population in China, Vietnam,
Laos, Thailand and Burma. While there is a large global Hmong diaspora, a significant proportion of
whom are in the United States, please note that for this paper and presentation I specifically
referring to Hmong populations in the Southeast Asian Massif and Northern Thailand in particular.
Hmong populations within the Southeast Asian context have a tendency to dwell in highland
areas, which refers to a thousand meters above sea level or above. This tendency to live in
highlands has often rendered the Hmong elgible to the state and been used to serve as justification
for sedentarization policies or alienating Hmong populations from the ethnic majority of their
respective countries. Hmong have a long history of fleeing wars, violence and marginalization
throughout the Massif as well as migration movements chosen to live closer to family,
natural resources or for personal preference. The first records of the Hmong in Thailand are from
the end of the 19th century. Most Hmong arrived in Thailand while fleeing the Indo-Chinese war
or the Communist overtaken bordering Laos. Within the Thai borders Hmong have both been villainized
for engaging in conflict as signs of communist uprising or conspiracy while also villainized
for remaining neutral which was projected as hiding counterinsurgency. Narratives of
shifting cultivation or swidden agriculture have often been used to problematize Hmong Mobility as
an issue of security while also blaming Hmong for environmental degradation seen to affect lowland
ethnic Thai. Hmong are often presented as the epitome of the Hill tribe problem in Thailand
which I return to on the next slide. In brief, the Hmong have a long history of marginalization
and have demonstrated cultural political and economic resilience throughout centuries of
oppression. Despite being repeatedly marginalized both geographically as well as politically and
socially, Hmong groups have remained independent and adaptable to these changes. Specific research
on Hmong population has demonstrated the resilience of their social cultural identities
as well as the fluidity and flexibility of their livelihoods and life worlds which are constantly
being renegotiated across temporal contexts. Thailand is referred to as an ethnically
homogenous nation with approximately 90% of the population considered of the ethnic Thai majority.
This ethnic identity has played a large role in nation building and as such the populations that
exist beyond this national narrative have endured many forms of marginalization particularly since
the renaming from the kingdom of Siam to the kingdom of Thailand in 1939. Hmong are one of
the eight Hill tribes in the highlands of Northern Thailand that are seen to go against the national
identity. Within the context of a changing International political climate and ongoing
nation building within Thailand, the discourse of a hill tribe problem emerged in the country in the
1960s. This discourse labeled Highland populations as a threat to the Thai majority population. Hmong
and other Highland minority populations have experienced decades of State minority conflicts
and tensions including being villainized for their lack of loyalty to the Thai State, cultivating
opium and their environmental practices and subsequently governmental and non-governmental
interventions to fix this so-called hilltribe problem. The study site for my current research
which goes by the pseudonym pardon me Ban Suay, is a green Hmong village of approximately 600 people
and Chang Mai province and formerly designated as within a protected forest area. For This research
I am able to draw on Jean Michaud's economic anthropology dissertation undertaken in the same
village approximately 30 years prior, as a means to draw longitudinal change. Since the 1990s the
main income generating activity in Ban Suay has shifted from opium cultivation through tourism and
vegetable production and now nearly exclusively to Orange Tree cultivation. This livelihood shift is
what prompted this search project as I sought to understand the drivers and implications of
this change and their social cultural impacts. Data collection has included nine months of
ethnographic fieldwork in Ban Suay from 2019 to 2023 using mixed methods including participant
observation, a representative household survey, conversational interviews, oral histories and
photo voice. Before I progress I would like to make a quick note on sexual orientation. All
marriages in Ban Suay, at the time of my field work have been heterosexual couples involving a
man and a woman and therefore I use these terms in this presentation. It is beyond my scope to
go into detail here but I do want to note that there a conversation of sexual orientation and
gender identity within Hmong Society is slowly beginning, particularly among the Hmong diaspora
in the United States. Overall Hmong Society is deeply gendered, productive and reproductive
labor activities are gendered, beliefs of the life and death cycle have gendered components,
socialization is highly gendered and the distribution of power within households and beyond
lies largely in men's hands. Hmong traditionally follow patri-locality as couples tend to move
in with the husband's parents upon marriage and live in the same village as the husband's clan.
Social networks are strongly patrilineal and among animous households upon marriage a woman
leaves her natal clan to join her husband's clan and honor his family's ancestors. Hmong culture
is accepting of polygyny, a form of polygamy whereby men men are allowed multiple wives but
women are only allowed one husband. Common topics of conversation during fieldwork include gendered
power and equities, gendered expectations of social behavior within and beyond the household,
gendered labor distributions and women's embodied safety including violence against women. This is
not to portray women as passive victims and indeed I have written not to the contrary.
Women form strong support networks for each other. Women individually and collectively
share means of demonstrating resistance both micro and micro forms of resistance and many
women who I encountered are actively working to raise conversations of gender roles in relations
and women's rights. In analyzing approximately 30 years of change, livelihood orientations within
the village have shifted near unanimously to Orange Tree cultivation. Ban Suay residents
repeatedly report the village to be developed now and that their present livelihoods and life ways
now meet the ambiguous standard of developed. In this research I seek to understand not only how
the drivers and impacts of this livelihood change but how social difference is embedded within these
transitions and particularly gender. Unfortunately given the length of this presentation,
I do not have enough time to give an adequate overview of long gender roles and relations in
its proper complexity or to present the entire paper so instead in the interest of time for
this presentation I will focus on three sites of change in particular the first being household
size and composition the second being being daughters-in-law and household roles and the
third being bride kidnapping and violence against women. The first example I explore is household
size and composition. Hmong households are usually comprised of two or three patrilineal generations,
usually at a minimum a man and his wife or multiple wives given polygeny and
their unmarried children. Previous estimates of household size in Ban Suay specifically came to
eight individuals per household in 1976 and an average a of 10 individuals in 1992 my survey
data in Ban Suay from 2020 reveals an average of six members per household ranging from 1 to
13 members in contrast to 1 to 23 members only a generation or two ago. As such the sizes of
Ban Suay households today are significantly smaller than observed in previous surveys. I
attribute this in part to three social cultural changes which I discuss in turn. First more Sons
Moving Out from their father's household, second fewer wives per adult man and third
fewer children for marriage. Parents remain in charge of decision-making and family finances
for the household, particularly the male household head, unless they intentionally ask for support
from their children with this as they enter old age. As such the household head and/or in
consultation with his wife determines who will undertake which tasks each day such as tending
to which agricultural land, staying at home with young children or driving to the mark market or
to purchase agricultural inputs. This remains the case even upon adulthood and marriage for sons,
so long as they stay within the household. As such this is one of the motivating factors for some
sons to move out and begin their own household. Sons Moving Out is a growing Trend in the village
today, with more and more adult men moving out from their parents' household with their wife
and children. As I unravel in the paper this has many socio-cultural and economic considerations,
including shifting monetary relationships within the household, the increased cash
flow from Orange cultivation alongside increased cost of living, and men's experiences as household
head. Most households now only have a maximum of one married son living with them while this not
only contributes to smaller household sizes it also raises questions surrounding inter
household relations including intergenerational relations and the role of daughters involved
within the household specifically. I will return to daughters-in-law momentarily. Other sources of
smaller household sizes are fewer wives per adult man and fewer children for marriage.
While polygeny is culturally appropriate and even viewed as a sign of prestige or wealth among men,
many women vocalize their fears and disinterest in their husband having more than one wife which
is contributing to fewer polygynous marriages. Moreover men also cite the rising cost of living
as not being able to afford multiple bride prices, but also the reduced need to have more than one
wife given that they no longer undertake shifting cultivation. As such, the very small percentage
of polygynous households can be attributed to a combination and indeed an interaction of gender
and agrarian considerations. Finally there is a reduced number of children per marriage,
which again is a factor of multiple interwoven processes. More Sons Moving Out raises concerns
about parents having enough agricultural landholdings to get gift each son which
has political constraints that I stress in the paper. This in combination with the rising cost
of living, even despite increased incomes are factoring into Family Planning decisions. Larger
household sizes and living with extended family remain important culturally and is viewed very
highly. Despite the social cultural preference, these drivers outlined here are overall reducing
household sizes across the village with particular impacts on inter household roles, relations and
distribution of wealth and labor. I turn to the role of daughters-in-law within the household as
a more specific example. In an example of gender hierarchies women in Ban Suay are expected to
respect their husbands. However, daughters-in-law face compounded roles of serving their husbands
and their husband's parents, a position that has been reported in the literature as particularly
burdensome. Indeed, my data set reveals that daughters-in-law are often in the most difficult
household position with a disproportionate burden of the household labor ascribed to them.
In light of this, many women await the day their first daughter-in-law marries into the family,
as the shift from being the daughter-in-law to a mother-in-law is a long- awaited moment when they
start having another woman to support their labor. In the words of one 54 year old woman, "All I want
is a daughter-in-law. I have worked so hard for so long. I was the daughter in my parents household
then the first daughter-in-law when I got married and I worked so hard for my parents-in-law
household for so many years. Now even though I am old I am still doing so much work and don't have
anybody to help me. I just want a daughter-in-law so I can finally have someone to help me." While
children, particularly daughters, are often expected to help their parents, this does
not equate the expected labor of daughters-in-law and many women associate marriage with taking on
greater responsibility in labor. However, over the past generation or two many women noted that the
role of daughter-in-law is not as burdensome as it was previously. In the words of another woman,
"When I first married I woke up around 4 or 5 a.m. I had to get up early to chop banana trees to feed
the pigs. But now we don't have any pigs and we don't have any swidden fields we only work in
Orange Orchard. So all those duties from back then have disappeared. So for my daughter-in-law all
her duties are way easier. They're not hard, so my daughter-in-law wakes up after 6. I don't say
anything to her because this generation they like to sleep. I know when I was their age and I didn't
have any kids I like to sleep too but I couldn't because I had to work at the swidden field every
day. Now we changed our livelihood. The way we lived has changed from before. Working at the
orange orchard is easier than the work back then. Now they have time to play with their phones. It's
so different from before." As illuminated by this participant the socio-cultural transformations
that have fundamentally change the household roles and expectations for daughters-in-law in
Ban Suay are deeply interconnected with livelihood transitions such as how agricultural transitions
have also reduced livestock rearing and therefore a significant labor burden for women. Therefore,
while the shift to smaller household sizes is based on many driving forces, including greater
cash income and cash needs for household and greater financial independence between parents and
their sons, it can also be seen as both a gendered and livelihood source of intra household change.
After identifying a partner Hmong marriages are instigated by the man through a tradition
variously referred to as bride kidnapping, bride theft or marriage by capture, which involves a
multiple day ceremony of taking the bride to the groom's house and beginning discussions for
marriage arrangements. Typically, if the woman stays at the man's house for three nights they
are then to be married this tradition has been practiced in many more communities however there
does not appear to be consensus in the literature on the exact means by which this occurs, including
the woman's right to refuse or resist, the extent to which is it symbolic versus violent or where it
is observed and to what extent. I can confirm that in this location bride kidnapping has been banned
since approximately 2010. Most individuals who discuss this change with me likened to development
or modernity and an increase in women's rights, comparing bride kidnapping to the old ways of
living. However for many women in having been kidnapped for marriage is a keystone moment in
their life history. For some it involved intense feelings of fear and sadness, for many it was
their first time encountering the village that is now their home and where they raised their family
and for others it was their first time meeting who became their husband. As such, though the
practice itself may now be banned in the village and thereby erased in narratives of developed I
suggest that bride kidnapping is still present in the village in terms of the living memories and
experiences of the current population. Stemming from this I further question what other forms of
women's embodied safety get overlooked in focusing on development and sites of change. Gender-based
violence holds a contested place in Hmong sociocultural literature. Gender-based violence is
often portrayed as a stereotype of Hmong culture overlooking the agency and resistance of Hmong
women who are victim to this violence as well as larger spheres of global patriarchy and power
structures that cannot be boxed in as a Hmong problem. Therefore, while gender-based violence is
indeed a problem that many women face in Ban Suay, today and previously I strive to preface women's
voices experiences and agency and emphasize the global problem of gender-based violence without
ascribing any blame to Hmong society specifically. This is consistent with feminist approaches to
power and social difference which attends to the often paradoxical spaces of interlocking
subjectivities. As detailed on the previous slide, violence surrounding bride kidnapping
that is observed elsewhere in Hmong populations is no longer accepted in Ban Suay. However
gender-based violence more broadly is prevalent in way today most predominantly intimate partner
violence many women shared that a certain degree of partner battering was commonplace
and there was nothing they could do to prevent it due to their subordinated status as women,
and, talking about a woman family member who was recently abused by her husband one woman stress
the frequency of gender based violence. "If you're in a fight, men have rights and power so men get
to hurt women. Women don't have rights or power so they cannot hurt men. Everybody experiences it.
There is nobody who doesn't get beat up by their husband. If somebody says they don't get abused,
that just means it doesn't happen very often, maybe only a few times. But there's nobody who
has never experienced it." And while I cannot attach to the pervasiveness of violence against
women to this extent, noticeable in this excerpt is how she attributes gender-based violence
to men's superior power over women. However, despite these experiences several women shared
that excessive violence is not acceptable. Often using the specific wording: no longer acceptable,
implying that it was more acceptable previously. A common threat in discussions of domestic violence
was not only the lack of its policing in Ban Suay specifically but also the contrast between
the policing of other ethnic groups in Thailand and the lack of policing domestic violence among
ethnic Homng. These are important interactions between gender, violence and ethnicity. Not only
do many women in bans assume that domestic violence is unavoidable in society, but
these fears are being reified in a legal system that marginalizes them based on their ethnicity
and location. Domestic violence and gender-based violence are global patriarchal problems. Not only
have other ethnic groups and often the literature characterize this as a Hmong specific issue,
but many women and victims to domestic violence themselves have internalized this as a Hmong
issue often suppressing any notion that it can change. I therefore close with this example of
the gender tensions and inequities that persist both simultaneous to and at times contradicting
other forms of change and women's improved rights. I therefore join other feminist Hmong
Scholars that call for more critical discussion of Hmong gender beliefs norms and relations in
their complexity and ongoing negotiation. In closing, this paper raises important new
findings and ongoing questions. The examples presented here demonstrate the ways in which
gender is interwoven with all forms and processes of development and change. As I argue elsewhere
Hmong woman is not a singular category but socially uneven and differentially experienced
across time and place, and therefore I asked how can we better account for intersectional
subjectivities and extension of this work? How can we forefront gender without missing
its uneven experiences? Building on this and the last example in particular what gender tensions
and and equities persist alongside sites of change? Here I call for greater emphasis on
balance between changes and continuities, as a more holistic understanding of gender
and longitudinality and finally how can we promote gender equity without creating any
notion of the need to improve societies. And so so to come back to this simplified graphic this
paper suggests new ways that we can consider gender as embedded within interacting with
and co-producing so-called development. Such an approach identifies both gender transformations
as well as gender tensions and inequities that persist. I argue that gender is more
than context and outcome but woven throughout all forms of livelihood economic and environmental
change and while I have focused on gender as a key s side of difference this thinking extends
to multiple and interacting subjectivities. And so that is where I will finish for today.
Thank you thank you again to Maria Elisa and those at the Women and Gender and Development
Series for inviting me. I would also like to thank my research funders,
notice here on the slide as well as all informants and respondents in the research and thank you to
everyone who attended for listening today and I would welcome any comments and questions.
Great thank you. Thank you so much Jennifer. So I'm gonna ask people to,
I haven't seen any questions come through in the chat, so unless I'm wrong I have your viewed I
don't see so please go ahead and raise your hand or if you prefer not to speak, raise your voice,
please go ahead and put it in the chat. Oh I see there's Eranga has his hand up.
Hi, can you hear me? Yeah Jennifer yeah super nice to see you again and yeah I'm super happy
to see. I'm I'm great work thanks for sharing this amazing work so I miss some of your work right so
after I move from McGill and can you I like to hear a little bit about your methods so can you
can you reflect on about your like ethnographic style fieldwork in Northern Thailand I mean what
is your experience in Thailand and how you dealt with the covid pandemic I know I'm pretty sure
you experienced that as well and what kind of challenges you experience like in general like
right? That's a big question and it's so wonderful to see you too Eranga. Thanks for coming today. I
often describe myself as working primarily with ethnography and participant observation as I
believe so much in terms of trying to understand life worlds and experiential forms of knowledge
sharing and embodied knowledge exists through a lot of those ethnographic methods however I also
undertook a household survey and part of the idea for this was that I thought that I was going to be
able to draw some really direct comparisons with Jean Michaud's survey work in the same Village 30
years prior and so that was a bit of a funny but also telling result was that almost every question
on his survey was irrelevant by the time I did my initial field work in the village and so it shows,
it demonstrated, how fundamentally livelihoods and life had changed in the village since his work
there. But I also use a very qualitative approach to surveys and so I work with both quantitative
but also a lot of qualitative data in that and that it's a way of getting a lot of in-depth,
household level information but also it's a great opportunity to ensure you're meeting with the
diversity of individuals and perspectives across the village. I also did oral histories, which I
really enjoyed having the chance and a research project that was an appropriate method and in
particular, as so much of this is focused on longitudinality oral histories was really fitting
for my research objectives. I certainly dealt with Covid, as the bulk of my fieldwork was in 2020 so
I had you know lockdown in Thailand. I was very fortunate that with the way the pandemic unfolded
Thailand actually was in a post-covid world for a lot of the latter of 2020 so I was actually
given special permission by both authorities in the village as well as the technical systems we
have to go through out at the university to return to fieldwork later in 2020 which was a wonderful
opportunity and then I was able to return this year as well so I've had yes different fieldwork
experiences at different times from basically 2019 to 2023 yes I'll move on to the next
question because I'm sure I'm rambling but have you to chat about any of that more as well okay.
So I have said Jacqueline you're next and then Larry.
Thank you Jennifer. Your presentation was really very informative. It's an interesting research I
like your the richness in it the tools that you've used. Maybe I'll have two questions for you. One
you mentioned that initially they were involved in opium cultivation so I was wondering why opium
and how did they leave opium to and two orange cultivation? Then, my second question is to do
with intimate partner violence how are you able to collect that information? Because it's rather
very sensitive, people don't usually like sharing that kind of information. Thank you very much.
Thank you for both of those questions. They're very different questions so I will go in the same
order that you asked them. Opium cultivation is in many parts of Southeast Asia considered
very stereotypical of Hmong populations. However this is a very depoliticized history and so in
my dissertation I'm able to offer more of the the politics and the history of that. In particular,
opium was actually facilitated at different points through different governments and especially
the Hmong population I love the phrasing that Hmong across Borders or borders across Hmong,
because Hmong populations have existed in what are now present day different countries,
well before the present demarcation of these borders, and so a lot of these histories are
transnational and so stemming back from Hmong opium cultivation in China. However it was
very harshly eradicated in Thailand as well as in ongoing in other parts of southeast Asia,
there's definitely still opium cultivation among Hmong populations in Thailand as well but as the
extent of my knowledge I'm not of any still being grown in my field site in particular. However I
do get into some conversation about other drug forms that are now affecting social cultural
change as well as livelihoods in the village. So my answer basically is that both the onset of
opium cultivation as well as the sharp decline are a very politicized history, and so I'll leave it
at that because I'm not able to offer a complete history there. Regarding domestic violence,
that's a really hard one and I guess that kind of builds on Eranga's question as well is fieldwork
can be very dense and you know as I'm a very feminist scholar I'm a very embodied learner
and listener and I really approach fieldwork openhearted and open-minded and so a lot of the
conversations go where people are wanting to share and so domestic violence was never originally part
of topics that I kind of came in looking for and it very quickly became a lot of what women started
talking to me about and so, my Gender, Place and Culture article that came out this year
has a bit of discussion on that as well as the ethicized politics of domestic violence among
Hmong populations that I touched on today but I I can't really say more than just I was there
to listen and definitely had certain research questions and areas of focus but in trying to
understand life worlds and social difference domestic violence was brought to me as part of
that experience and those answers.
Okay thank you so much Jennifer. Larry go ahead and then I'm I'm
gonna put myself up after Larry so okay go ahead.
Thank you Jennifer. You've documented a big agricultural shift into Orange production and
one of your interviewees suggested there was also then a corresponding decrease in
livestock production. So I'd like to know a little bit more about whether that transition
into Orange production followed the existing gender norms or if it shook things up a little
bit? Who controlled the land, the production, the money and how the money was used? And if
that drop in livestock production was directly related to the higher availability of cash to
buy protein or did even the diets change as a result of that transition? Thanks.
Yeah, so livestock, thank you for the question, livestock rearing is again a very central part
of a lot of Hmong livelihoods in rural areas in Southeast Asia. In particularly, in particular,
pardon me are that of swamp buffalo and black pigs are very central to animist Hmong spiritual
beliefs and play a significant role in a lot of Hmong diet and worshiping ancestors and in
particular livelihoods and so it was fascinating to and so I guess I should have offered a bit
more of my own subjectivity entering into this research, I have spent years I'm very
familiar living and working in Laos, which borders Thailand, and I've worked with Hmong populations
in Laos specifically and so that was one of the biggest shocks, the first time that enter
in Ban Suay, was discovering that there's not a single buffalo in the entire village as well
as pig rearing is nearly non-existence and even over the course of my doctoral studies that's on
a further decline. It has certainly shifted gender roles in terms of I think one of the
quotes I shared today was touching on this as well, pig wearing was a huge role among women,
it's very labor intensive particularly really like both collecting but also preparing and delivering
food to the pigpens is a significant and very laborious task. And so there is a combination
of both more cash input available to buy meat and there are three stores in the village that
do sell meat as well as just an exhaustion and and less of an interest in how laborious it is to
raise pigs and this has definitely shifted local diets. Black pig meat was considered a Hmong or
it is considered a Hmong delicacy and now this is saved for specific rituals, many households
may only have one pig that they save for Hmong new year or a specific event, otherwise and so
it's definitely shifting a lot of the different questions that you you asked there. Another thing
is that horses were a big part of livelihoods at the time of Michaud's study in the same village in
terms of horses were used to carry products to and from the village from agricultural lands. However,
now with basically I forget the exact percentage but approximately 80% of households now have a
truck for carrying agricultural goods and there's now an improved road down to the market and so
horses are now completely non-existent. Buffalo are completely non-existent and only cows are only
in about six households and they're basically just packed in the forest as like a form of
additional income generation but no central part of livelihoods, So definitely a lot of changes in
livestock rearing that have accompanied and been interwoven with agricultural changes as well.
Thank you. So since I'm co-host it won't let me
raise my hand, so I'm raising it here, hello, so I want to follow up on one the what Eranga asked
about and then also the Jacqueline. So Eranga's question was about methods and and then Jacqueline
was how were you able to collect this intimate partner violence information. So I just want to
make a push for the importance of, I love what you said, openhearted open-minded and really I would
say also qualitative and participatory methods where you have the humility as a researcher to
know that you are going to listen and learn from the people that you are that you're studying,
that you're learning from and I want to two examples where intimate partner violence kind
of well gender violence came up that was totally unexpected because my work does not focus on that
topic it's mostly agriculture and one was in a focused group in Uganda in Northern Uganda,
North Eastern Uganda but it was a focus group where I often start usually I have separate men
and women's focus groups so they can share things that are that they won't share if if it's a mixed
group but in this case it was a mixed group and was asking what were the changes that occurred in
the last 10 years in agriculture and how did it affect men and women differently. And the
first and very excited response was from two like teenage girls who said female genital mutilation
has been banned in Uganda this year and it was like okay so I wrote it on the chart and that was
not the question and that was not really the topic the the project, which was about peanut farming
and aflatoxins, but that was really important to them and that made it on the timeline and that, so
creating a space you know was very interesting and then in Bangladesh, which I'm going back to this
weekend as you know Jennifer to follow up on this project, we had an IPM Integrated Pest Management
project which included tricho-compost that is done in people's backyard and women because they spend
most of their time there, were the ones that really were the experts on it and and did a lot
of the management of it, and the husbands would say talk to my wife she's the expert so we did
a study interviewing a lot of the men and women in the households and what and and what came out
was what the literature calls soft indicators of empowerment so rather than the economic indicators
that are our projects funded by USAID, which is what most of our projects are mostly they
track you know increased income increased income either through the sale of the tricho-compost
or tricho-leead or through improved vegetable production but women several women have reported
increased confidence, self-esteem, respect and that their husbands beat them less, as linked
to their participation in tricho-compost, so that was not the question we did not ask about we did
not ask about that but I think creating this space and listening and and actually keeping, you know
making note of what what's important to people is just a really important thing that just doesn't
happen in in much research and I think you know in feminist research it is perhaps more that you're
trying to connect but but not even necessarily you don't have to be a feminist researcher to
use participatory and qualitative methods and listen to what people think is important so.
I think that there's a bit of a balance where I think a lot of people kind of shy away from
there's this huge focus on positionality and researcher subjectivity but then I also
think there's a bit of a shying away from the emotions and the a fieldwork because fieldwork
is a privilege and we are very lucky to get to do what we do and there are definitely different axes
of power between researchers and participants and so I think because there is a lot of that critique
that then people actually do tend to shy away from just being a human in field is that's like I'm a
human geographer and I'm a human in that and I think that there's two pieces that are coming to
mind in particular that like number one is Sarah Moser's paper, on in area, that was just about how
where's personality in talks of positionality and and truly who we are is more about just listing
off any you know objective identifiers of forms of difference but actually who are we, who are we
when we enter the field, and another one actually just cross my site this morning so I haven't even
read it yet but I was excited to see Judith Keller just had a paper as well on the I believe it's on
a motion in fieldwork and so forth that just came out today and I'm excited to read that and I think
that it it should be a bigger topic I think that and it's definitely something that I write into my
research very openly and even that the Gender, Place and Culture paper that I had published,
you know one of the reviewers was saying that it was very effective talking about domestic violence
and so I went the root of you know having a little note to readers okay there's some
explicit conversation to come but as you say you know truly trying to understand the life worlds
and life views of the people that I'm researching with is also as you say allows topics to come into
the work that we don't know coming and that's part of the whole point of field work is that
if we knew the answers we wouldn't be doing it to begin with so seeing what emerges for sure.
Great. Thank you. So, I have two questions and comments from Jessica Spence and Noshaba
Zafar. So, Jessica says great work Jennifer, I enjoyed your presentation,
earlier you mentioned using photo voice was that on another project and if so how did it impact
your understanding of these overall issues. So that is the same project, and I actually
did photo voice for the first time this year and it was something that I thought could in
my follow up field work could help to get at more inter household dynamics
and so forth that I thought would really be complimentary to my pre-existing data set,
I didn't find it particularly successful in this context I think that there was it's something that
I would say I'm still kind of working through what I did find and also what I didn't through
photo voice I'd say is is where I leave that one right there and I think the visualization
is fascinating it's also like in this field site phones are completely ubiquitous and so I thought
from a technological standpoint that there would be a bit better ease with the task but almost
I would say almost every single person that I asked to participate said let me just tell you,
so the interest of actually doing the photos was not there. I definitely had
a couple people you know okay once they were committed to the task it was really
fascinating to see what came from that and even the people who never took a photo hearing the
responses that came up to those the framing of the questions with photo voice in mind was
really interesting data but I I wouldn't say that it was a particular success with this
current study and I'm sorry there was a second part that question and I forget what it was.
How did it impact your understanding of these overall issues?
I would say that it's you know when you're that deep into doctoral dissertation I think that
everything is a constant or slow expansion and so I didn't find photo voice changed anything
significantly but it was new ways of asking questions and new ways of having that those
questions answered and one thing that was, everybody that had already participated in
the household survey, three years prior and so that also was way you know I did this before
and now I'm interested in asking in other ways as people definitely understood it was
a different way of asking questions and sharing knowledge and so, yes, but I have to say that the
interest was not there and obviously it's not my role to force a method onto participants.
Okay so the other question is from Noshaba and she says, "Thanks Jennifer for sharing your experience
and research I was wondering what was the reason to pick this community in Northern Thailand?"
So that is a I guess a two-fold answer. So as I mentioned I had previous experience living
in Laos and I speak Laos, and then I decided for my Master's research that I really wanted a very
different setting and to explore some similar ideas that I was interested in but to really
shake up context and culture and people in place, right as a human geographer and so given the fact
that I speak Spanish that's what took me to the Peruvian Amazon and the fact that I am an
embodied researcher southeast Asia is closer to family and what would enable me to do long-term
field work so I speak pretty decent Thai and definitely by the end of my field work that's
what got me to that much better of a level of Thai to undertake the field work, but then the second
tier to that question it was when I was exploring potential opportunities for doctoral work that,
I got in touch with my current supervisor who is Sarah Turner at MCGill and Sarah and Jean have
collaborated and so that's when she shared with me that Jean had always had this idea of a bit
of a follow-up study in the same village, given that he had gone back to visit a few times over
the years and had noticed some of these changes and so that's what made me know that so much of
this was occurring and so I went in 2019 for an initial fieldwork visit and kind of focus
in on my research questions but that's what got me to that very specific village was knowing
that there was almost a baseline study and as I mentioned it didn't end up being a very neat
longitudinal analysis which is too perfect because life is not neat in transition.
So, okay, lets see if we have have any more questions or comments conversations.
Okay so we're coming to the end of our time. So Jennifer do you want to say any
closing thing or or I'll give my little oh let's see let's see so Noshaba says,
"Thanks Jennifer I have experience of living in Thailand for more than a decade
and I've been observing the indigenous communities and how they are different
than mainstream Thai society that's why I was interested to know your selection."
So it's great thank you. Thank you so much for sharing.
Okay well let me do my little closing spiel, so thank you all for attending and thank you
Jennifer for a wonderful presentation. We're sharing, Shriya shared the link
for a short survey so please fill it out and I do want to announce our next event which is
on November 9th Dr. Sana Illahe is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Wisconsin
La-Crosse and she'll be talking about gender negotiation of urban spaces among transgender
persons in Pakistan: dismantling the colonial binary, so do not miss this one! That one will
be both in person in the library here at Virginia Tech and and on Zoom, so it's hybrid. And check
our website for more information and let us know in the survey if you want to be added
to our listserv to get updates on future events. So have a wonderful day and we or evening if you
are in a different time zone and we hope to see you on November 9th and thank you so much Jennifer
Thanks again everyone.