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Contribution short abstract

CGIAR STIBs Learning Labs in flood-hit West Bengal disrupted agri-research via feminist gaze-shifting. Women farmers architected program design via transdisciplinary dialogues —from literacy to demand-driven collectives - challenging researchers to move beyond gender modules to program re-genesis.

Contribution long abstract

CGIAR GENDER's Learning Labs on Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles (STIBs) in West Bengal represent a deliberate feminist rupture in agricultural research – not through grand theory, but through the quiet insistence of women farmers who refuse to be mere data points. We convened Learning Labs with Scheduled Tribe and Caste women managing poultry, pigs, and goats amid annual prolonged flooding. These spaces disrupted the linear "researcher-to-farmer" pipeline, creating iterative "gaze-shifting" dialogues where women articulated programme models – from functional literacy as livelihood bedrock to demand-driven collectives that outstrip rote SHGs.

Our methodology was feminist because it centred women's dual gazes – the intimate (how trainings rewove household permissions into joint decisions) and the strategic (a blueprint demanding continuous market intel and shock-responsive veterinary care). Transdisciplinary because STIBs fused veterinary science with social network mapping, value chains, gender analysis, and flood-cycle calendars – refusing siloed expertise.

This approach surfaced "sensitive" truths that conventional metrics miss. Women described not just income gains (reinvested poultry earnings funding health check-ups) but eroded dependencies: selling without spousal nod, negotiating trader weights, pooling money for emergency medicines. The "small wins" across STIB causal pathways included gender-sensitized field staff enabling household workload sharing to ethno-vet trainings yielding lightning arrestors women now install independently.

These Labs model feminist disruption at intersections: caste-flood-climate-agency. They challenge researchers to move beyond "gender modules" to program re-genesis. This experience offers a grounded provocation: what if "sensitive" research isn't about protecting subjects, but unleashing their gaze to redesign the systems studying them?