On the 19th and 20th of February, the Little Tools team gathered in Tøyen Hovedgård, in Oslo Botaniske Hagen, to discuss progress and plan for the last couple of year of the project. The participants were PI Kristin Asdal, postdocs Béatrice Cointe, Tone Huse and Hilde Reinertsen, and PhD candidates Bård Hobæk, Silje Morsman and Tommas Måløy.
Each participant brought a draft-in-progress to the table. This fostered intense and productive discussions on empirical as much as conceptual and methodological matters, and enabled the group to see how each subproject linked to the others.
Kristin Asdal launched the meeting with an overview of current progress, achievements and plans. With everyone now deep in the empirical material, the project has reach a crucial stage of shaping, landing and writing fown ideas. This was followed by a session on the "science" part of Little Tools, with a focus on the work of Silje and Tommas who both follow biologists studying cod genomics and immunology. The group concluded the first day with a discussion around Kristin and Béatrice's draft on economic and marketing experiments as sites of production, linking up the "science" and "markets" work packages.
The second day started with 5 hours of in-depth discussion, commentary and collective work around Kristin and Tone's draft manuscript for a book on the economic life of cod. While focusing on how to make the most of the existing text, the discussions addressed key issues and topics of the Little Tools project as a whole, both from an empirical and conceptual perspective. These continued in the last session, which was around Bård's PhD work on salmon feed and salmon feed research in Norway. The group is now geared up for a spring of writing!