Table 3 Third auto-ethnographic vignette

The meeting takes place in a small conference room on the 17th storey of a university building and the sunlight impairs the view on the overhead screen. I am trying to take a panorama photo of the city skyline, whilst my colleagues from the Global South attempt to join the wireless guest network. This is the first day of a two-day ‘end-of-project’ meeting, which was actually scheduled for June but was postponed for four months due to delays in the visa applications of our colleagues from abroad. Our formal agenda is to discuss the ‘lessons learned’ of the project and to decide on any potential scientific outputs.

Our final item just before lunch is the sharing of data. A project member explains that we are now gathering all data in a “secured server”^a as per university and European data protection regulations. Peter, a Southern professor, responds that it is entirely unclear for their team what should be uploaded where: “(…) what data are we talking about?”. The professor, who only became involved later on in the project, subsequently says that they might have misunderstood part of the data collection and asks whether we could explain that more clearly. It is decided that I will make a data checklist that clearly shows what data should have been collected and what needs to be uploaded to the digital storage. Tomorrow’s agenda will therefore allot some time to discuss data practices, beside the scheduled “project deliverables”, “planned publications”, and “next funding”.

The second day of our project meeting starts with a discussion about one of the research methods we further developed. The project proposal stipulated that we would use this research method to conduct ten case-studies in all three countries, but thus far this activity has commenced in one of the project countries only. Peter explains that the interviews have not yet started in his country and that he is opposed to doing interviews “across the country”, as travel is “very expensive and logistically too intensive” (fieldnotes). One project member is not quite satisfied with this answer and explains that it is important that the process is completed, certainly as we promised the funder that we would do it and because we need the data for our analysis. After a short deliberation, Peter concedes that “they are happy to do it”, but it requires more budget and if that is to be made available, November will be “activity time” (fieldnotes) in his country. It is decided that the number of interviews will be reduced and that interviews will take place over telephone.

I realise that I will be the one to check and monitor whether the teams in the project countries conduct all activities as planned and promised. In practice, this means sending e-mail reminders every week and texting my senior colleagues in these countries until we receive a full report that is to our satisfaction. This is precisely what I have done throughout the past two years and which gave me a constant feeling of policing and belittling them – certainly as they are generally more advanced in their academic career and experience than I am.