Situated knowledges, plurality & positionality - Jingjing & Lucy

Jingjing (April) Guo has a story of transition, from an undergraduate trained in biomedical engineering to a PhD fellow exploring social science guided courses to become a change agent. Before becoming a RECOMS fellow, she worked as a Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) analyst in Munich for almost 4 years, focused specifically on the environmental, social, and governance issues in the extractive and electronics industries.

Her PhD focuses on better understanding rural communities’ ability to engage in a collective change process in rural China.

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds and what worlds make stories. - Donna J. Haraway Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016: 12)

QUESTIONS:

• Have you ever experienced the 'paralysis' Jingjing refers to in her care-full attempt only to represent the voices and not to gaslight?
• Is there anything she says that resonates with you? Anything that creates dissonance?

Dr Lucy Aphramor is an Associate Professor in Gender, Power and the Right to Food at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience at Coventry University and a poet. They studied nutrition and dietetics at Surrey University. Patient stories, while working in dietetics in the NHS, caused them to become concerned about fat stigma and to question the usefulness of a lifestyle approach to public health. What about trauma? What about racism? Disability justice? Poverty? They developed a health-justice approach, that acknowledges the impact of power in nutrition-related conditions, like diabetes and heart disease.