Struggles over family land? Tree crops, land and labour in Ghana's Brong-Ahafo region

Agricultural land use in much of Brong-Ahafo region, Ghana has been shifting from the production of food crops towards increased cashew nut cultivation in recent years. This article explores everyday, less visible, gendered and generational struggles over family farms in West Africa, based on qualitative, participatory research in a rural community that is becoming increasingly integrated into the global capitalist system. As a tree crop, cashew was regarded as an individual man's property to be passed on to his wife and children rather than to extended family members, which differed from the communal land tenure arrangements governing food crop cultivation. The tendency for land, cash crops and income to be controlled by men, despite women's and young people's significant labour contributions to family farms, and for women to rely on food crop production for their main source of income and for household food security, means that women and girls are more likely to lose out when cashew plantations are expanded to the detriment of land for food crops. Intergenerational tensions emerged when young people felt that their parents and elders were neglecting their views and concerns. The research provides important insights into gendered and generational power relations regarding land access, property rights and intra-household decision-making processes. Greater dialogue between genders and generations may help to tackle unequal power relations and lead to shared decision-making processes that build the resilience of rural communities.

The challenges of creating actionable knowledge: an action research perspective

Academia has a critical role in developing new knowledge which construction industry practitioners need to envision, undertake and sustain successful innovation. The new knowledge produced by academia, however, often does not satisfy the needs of practitioners. This unsatisfactory state of affairs is frequently taken to be the consequence of the cultural, motivational and operational differences between the two communities. Actionable knowledge is presented as a useful concept which can fuse the expectations, contributions and outputs of academia and practitioners. Within this context, action research is argued to be an appropriate methodology to develop successful actionable knowledge. Results from an action research project are given which provide researchers and practitioners greater understanding of the key factors that shape the degree to which action research produces actionable knowledge: change focus, collaboration capabilities and systematic process. The criteria intrinsic to Mode 2 research (Gibbons et al., 1994) are demonstrated to have utility in evidencing actionable knowledge. The implication for policy is that there is a need to develop and use appropriate actionable knowledge frameworks and measures to design funding calls, and to evaluate research proposals and outputs.

The distributed work of local action: interaction amongst virtually collocated research teams

Existing research on synchronous remote working in CSCW has highlighted the troubles that can arise because actions at one site are (partially) unavailable to remote colleagues. Such ‘local action’ is routinely characterised as a nuisance, a distraction, subordinate and the like. This paper explores interconnections between ‘local action’ and ‘distributed work’ in the case of a research team virtually collocated through ‘MiMeG’. MiMeG is an e-Social Science tool that facilitates ‘distributed data sessions’ in which social scientists are able to remotely collaborate on the real-time analysis of video data. The data are visible and controllable in a shared workspace and participants are additionally connected via audio conferencing. The findings reveal that whilst the (partial) unavailability of local action is at times problematic, it is also used as a resource for coordinating work. The paper considers how local action is interactionally managed in distributed data sessions and concludes by outlining implications of the analysis for the design and study of technologies to support group-to-group collaboration.