Unearthing farming resilience: insights from photo elicitation

Abstract This paper introduces a visual methodology, photo elicitation (PE), to study farming resilience in the context of transnational private governance. It focuses on seven Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) farms within the Thungthong Yangyeun Producer Group in Thailand. Considerable research has looked at the resilience of farming systems focusing on the crucial aspects of adaptation, transformation, and robustness. Nevertheless, our understanding of how farming resilience can be cultivated in PGS farms remains limited, while visual methods have rarely been used to study the resilience of farming practices, especially in the field of International Relations. In addition, exploring spirituality, values, and the relationships between humans and non-humans is crucial for understanding farming resilience, yet it remains a challenging endeavour thus far. The findings indicate that PE effectively addresses these gaps by sparking engaging and meaningful group discussions, encouraging introspection, and establishing links to individual and collective memories and past experiences. Photos serve as a bridge between researchers and farmers, enabling access to complex data. The paper concludes that analysing farming resilience using PE offers fresh insights into how PGS farmers enhance adaptability, transformability, and robustness amidst crises. It reveals how spirituality and human-nonhuman relationships play crucial roles in transnational private governance. The innovative visual data collection tools, verbal and non-verbal communication techniques, and the methods for data analysis developed in this research can be applied in future studies within the field of International Relations and across a range of social science disciplines.