Conducting interviews

I conducted in-depth interviews with five social innovators in the Western Cape food landscape over a nine-month period (July 2016 to March 2017), to elicit their own personal stories, as well as the stories of their respective Seeds. I tried to structure the interviews to be more generative than extractive, and hoped the exchange would be empowering and valuable experience for the participant. I was aware that the sharing of stories can be a deeply personal and sensitive undertaking, and that often the most insightful stories come from a place of raw emotional honesty and vulnerability (Kurtz 2014). I always tried to be mindful of this, and to treat the participants as well as their stories with sensitivity and respect, for example by not pushing a particular line of questioning if it felt too intrusive (Clandinin 2007).

As I began conducting interviews, I also turned for inspiration, grounding and refamiliarization with my own craft to the podcasts of Krista Tippett, a highly acclaimed American journalist whose in-depth interviews with eminent poets, philosophers, scientists and thinkers have struck me as extraordinary in the deep truths of the human experience that are revealed in conversation between an interviewer and participant. I considered the ethics of

appreciative, thoughtful and intuitive deep listening to be an entry to seeing the world from the participant’s perspective and faithfully capturing their stories (Smith et al. 2009).

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Thus the interviews I conducted were loosely structured and collaborative exchanges. I asked participants to describe their direct experiences of participating in their relative Seeds, describing how the seed was

conceptualised; what particular issues or context the Seed was/is responding to; how the person’s own particular story, values, identity and worldview intersects with the formation and development of the Seed.

As the interviews took place, I kept the following questions in the back of my mind as a preliminary way of beginning to connect and contrast different themes and threads of the stories as I gathered them. For example:

1) Are there similarities and contrasts in the kinds of strategies and priorities the food innovators describe in the process of developing the respective Seeds?

2) What seems to motivate and inspire them?

3) The ways that they both encounter and respond to various challenges along the way?

4) Are there particular experiences which seem important in shaping their value systems, how they see the world and approach making change?

In particular, I listened out for, and sought to elicit, stories (i.e. accounts of specific events and experience, as opposed to generalisations or opinions) from participants which might shed some light on these questions (Kurtz 2014). When participants told stories, I would ask them to reflect on the meaning of the story, asking questions such as ‘Why do you think that happened?’ or ‘How did you feel about it?’, thus also capturing some of the participants’ interpretations of their own stories (Kurtz 2014).

I tried to make a mental note as I noticed points of similarity or contrast

among participants, in terms of how they expressed themselves, the important themes in their work, and places where their experience resonated with

theory. For example, I noted in the course of doing interviews that most

participants told stories about personal experiences which made them see the world differently and were significant to the story of the Seed itself. It also did

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not take me long to recognise that several of the participants had important relationships with one another which were also significant to their stories, a point I will return to with narrative network analysis later in this chapter. Thus in a sense, the first layer of interpretation and analysis began during the interviews themselves, and my observations during this phase informed my choices of methods and how I developed subsequent steps of the process, such as bringing in Lejano et al.’s narrative network analysis (2013) and Brown’s 3 R’s (2015).

All interviews were recorded. After each interview I transcribed the recording in full, trying also to capture nonverbal information such as laughter or pauses in the conversation (Smith et al. 2009). Once completed, I sent each

participant a copy of their interview transcript by email, including a brief list of my own observations and reflections on the key themes of the interview. I invited participants to respond with their own impressions and reflections on the experience. Later on, I returned to these brief reflections to help shape the stories that I wrote in step 5 of the storymaking process, and that are

presented in Chapter 4.

3.2.3.1 Connection through place

Place served as an important prompt during all the interviews. Several of the interviews took place at the physical site of the Seed. In other interviews, the place served as an entryway into the person’s world. One interview with Rusch, the indigenous food innovator, for example, took place along

Kommetjie beach where she had developed much of her early knowledge of foraging in the landscape. Another, with van der Merwe, the chef, took place in the coastal nature reserve where he visits for regular inspiration in

developing his seasonal menus.

I asked Khan, the coordinator of the Slow Food Youth Network, to choose a location for the interview that was significant to her. This experiential and embodied context was important, reflecting the observation of Lejano et al.

(2013: 2), that ‘... the environment is often discussed in scientific terms that can obscure motivations driven from memory, feelings informed by tradition,

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family, and beauty, and other rationales for behavior that can seem irrational from a technical perspective. Box 3.2 lists the location of each interview.

These locations are also labelled on a map of the Western Cape (Appendix A).

Box 3.2: Locations of interviews with food innovators

Zayaan Khan Interview 1: Signal Hill, Cape Town Interview 2: Woodstock, Cape Town Chuma Mgcoyi Interview 1: Tyisa Nabanye, Cape Town

Interview 2: Surplus Peoples Project offices, Salt River, Cape Town

Loubie Rusch Interview 1: Moya we Khaya, Khayelitsha Interview 2: Kommetjie

Nazeer Sonday Interview 1: Vegkop Farm, Philippi Horticultural Area Kobus van der Merwe Interview 1: Wolfgat Restaurant, Paternoster

Interview 2: Cape Columbine Nature Reserve, Paternoster

3.2.3.2 Connection through food

I found that the direct sensory experience of food, along with gathering edible plants from the landscape with participants, enriched the study in small ways:

harvesting small bunches of dune spinach from a municipal median strip¹⁴ adjacent to Kommetjie beach with Loubie Rusch and Olive Zgambo, and later tasting these succulent leaves in our lunch; sampling tiny brown sage flowers growing in the landscape with Zayaan Khan; tasting toasted dune celery seeds with Kobus van der Merwe. These small experiences of tasting things growing in the landscape appeared to stimulate memories and associations and help prompt richer stories and reflections from participants.

14 While the picking of wild plants is illegal without a permit, harvesting cultivated plants from such areas maintained by the municipality is permissible.

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3.2.3.3 Perceptual awareness

In some of my interviews, I was struck by ways in which participants

connected deeply and emotionally to food, nature, ecology and landscape. In terms of the phenomenology part of IPA, I was particularly interested in the link between experience and perception, reflected in an understanding of the importance of our embodiment in the world: ‘the embodied nature of our relationship to that world and how that led to the primacy of our own individual situated perspective on the world’ (Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Smith et al.

2009: 18-21). For me, this idea raised an interesting tension, as a number of participants reflected on the importance of feeling connected to and inspired by the complex living relationships of the natural world. Through having an awareness of different perceptual and emotional dimensions to how people connect to the world around them, often linked to worldview and cultural belief systems, I felt I could capture more of the richness and significance that was expressed by participants (Harding 2009). Thus this sense of embodiment in an animate world, and a relational view of life, provided an appreciative

backdrop to, for example, discussions on entomophagy, the practice of eating insects, with Khan (2016).