Unsettling accounts: Voicing disquiet in other rainforests

Women's Voices from the Rainforest. Janet Gabriel Townsend (in collaboration with Ursula Arrevillaga, Jennie Bain, Socorro Cancino, Susan F. Frenk, Silvana Pacheco and Elia Pérez). Routledge, London, UK and New York, USA, 1995, pp. viii + 212. ISBN 978-0-415-10532-3 (pbk).

Women's Voices from the Rainforest (WVFTR) provides an unsettling account of women's experiences in the process of transforming forests to fields in Colombia and Mexico. In this short reflection, I elaborate on what I found ‘unsettling’, initially during my engagement with the book and its genesis, but also on the ways the approach and substantive themes of the book continue to unsettle my own research journey and messy collaborations in Indonesia. Re-reading Janet Townsend's work, I realize how much her informal mentorship through the pages of the book and through our in-person conversations have shaped the substantive themes of my work on resettlement (Indonesia's transmigration programme) and ‘forced’ displacement (associated with conservation and large-scale corporate investments in oil palm), always with an evolving (and sometimes troubled) idea of learning stories ‘from below’ (Elmhirst, 1999; Elmhirst et al., 2017).