Led by Dr. Olena Strelnyk and Dr. Susanne Koch, the In-Forest researchers at TUM together with Dr. Amani Uisso at the Tanzania Forestry Research Institute have published an analysis emerging from the ethnographic component of the project in Forest Policy and Economics. Building on scholarship addressing gender inequality in forestry, it investigates how African scholars experience gendered struggles in doing forest governance research.

Based on interviews with twenty female and male scholars affiliated with research organisations in African countries, we examine how gender in intersection with other dimensions like locality and class affect their experiences as academics in forest governance research. The study reveals that African women scholars in the field encounter specific difficulties in meeting the requirements of scientific productivity and mobility due to patriarchal gender orders.

Aside from difficulties to reconcile their roles as wives, mothers and academics, they are confronted with instances of marginalisation in forest research discourse and fieldwork. The picture emerging from the empirical data is that the complexity of struggles female African scholars experience, and the great efforts they need to make to participate in forest governance research remain somewhat ‘invisible’ in academic contexts.

The study uses a Bourdieusian lens of science as a (gendered) field of struggle, which is used in the wider project as a meta-theoretical lens connected the qualitative and quantitative analyses performed. Methodologically, we adopted an integrative interpretative approach of analysis focusing on narratives, positionings and discursive dynamics, which sets the study apart from interview-based research that focuses on explicit content only. 

The paper is available open access.

Full reference:
Strelnyk, O., Koch, S., Tetley, C., Sunagawa, S., Uisso, A.J., 2024. Science as a field of struggle: Gendered experiences of African scholars doing forest governance research. Forest Policy and Economics 169, 103339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2024.103339