(from University of Strathclyde Department of Geography and Sociology newsletter)

The annual human ecology field trip took place on Eigg during April led by Alastair McIntosh and Verene Nicolas. There was fog and heavy rain for all but one of the five days, but if anything this intesified the depth of learning experience. The purpose of the visit is to learn about human ecology in a small island community with which the human ecology programme has long connections with a high level of trust already established.

After a day of orientation, students go out in pairs to island families and spend a day volunteering. The work varies in practice from hard graft in the rain shifting heavy concrete blocks, to sitting round a farmhouse kitchen table all day long eating home baking or drinking whisky. Life is not always fair, but it teaches diverse meanings and approaches to the word 'research' and the meanings of 'data'! 

During this exercise each pair of students gets a unique, and often radically contradictory, view of what the life of the community is like. They bring back their cameos of what they learned (with due sensitivity to confidentiality) to the group, and using Freirian methodology, draw out "generative themes" - that is, the underlying main issues that affect the community and help to interpret how it operates. This year the students chose to represent this in the form of a map (see picture below).

Finally, a group of island women were invited to join us and share around what the students had experienced and also about the dynamics of gender in a small community - including the relevance, or otherwise, of such insights to human ecology in the wider world.