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In July 2020, Alex Franklin acted as track chair at the annual International Sustainable Development Research Society (ISDRS) Conference. Organised around the theme of ‘public participation and the role of stakeholders’ Alex used the opening introduction as an opportunity to briefly present on the RECOMS ITN as both scholarly and in-practice inspiration for the track.

As an ITN fellow, one of the cornerstones of the program is mobility. Mobility for our research, for training but also mobility for personal matters since most of us are a couple of thousand kilometers away from family and friends. However, the pandemic has come to put in question all these things that a few months ago, no one would have thought twice, like taking a train or a plane to get to your next training. Suddenly the world became so small. 

Being left without the option of leaving the country, we decided to go the Finnish way: rent a mökki (a cottage in the countryside, often the second or third or fourth house, with surrounding forests of about the size of Luxembourg and very, very, very few or preferably no neighbors. Occasionally, it may have a toilet with running water), get groceries for 2 weeks and disappear from society.

I conducted interviews with 25 alternative farmers in Japan with the help of translator. Next to the usual challenges of conveying social and cultural connotations from Japanese to English, I noticed how the quotes from the interviews do not adequately convey the emotions that were present during the interviews. These emotions are rooted in the practices and experiences of the farmers. They convey their connections with the physical environments like landscapes, soil, and plants.