Between Boundaries and Bridges: Friction, Translation, and Mutual Learning in Mangrove Swamp Rice Farming in Guinea-Bissau

This thesis examines what happens when different ways of knowing and doing come into contact in research, development, and conservation. It focuses on moments of friction — such as misunderstandings, disagreements, and conflicting priorities — not as problems to eliminate, but as opportunities for understanding how people learn and work together.
To explore this, the thesis develops a framework called translating along friction, which treats friction as a starting point for analysis. Rather than trying to merge different knowledge systems into one, the framework explores how differences can be made partially intelligible across contexts while remaining grounded in their social and ecological settings.
The framework is applied to mangrove swamp rice farming in Guinea-Bissau, where farmers, researchers, NGOs, and government actors interact around tides, dikes, drainage, and mangrove restoration. Across four empirical cases, the thesis shows that learning and collaboration across knowledge systems are often partial, uneven, and shaped by power, assumptions, and difference.