This summer, the Slovenian group of PoPMeD-SuSDeV carried out three secondments. Two of them took place in July 2023 at the PI institution, the IQS School of Management, University Ramon Llull. During this time, Nataša Gregorič Bon, a Research Associate at ZRC SAZU, conducted a secondment at the IQS School of Management, where I enjoyed the vibrant environment of the school. Although my secondment started just before the summer holidays, I still managed to experience some of the school's summer activities. Both the researchers and the administrative staff welcomed me warmly and offered me a pleasant workplace, access to the library and other facilities necessary for my research.

In the first days of my secondment, I was introduced to the school, staff and department by the wonderful administrator of PoPMeD-SuSDeV, Gabriela Escamilla Leal. She introduced me to the department and informed me about all the specifics I needed for my individual work in the department. In the first days of my secondment, a Slovenian PI of this Horison Rise project, Dr Martina Bofulin - who was on secondment at the same time as me – and I met with one of the PoPMeD SuSDeV members, Dr Flavio Comim, Dean IQS School of Management. During our conversation, we exchanged our research ideas and set the framework for our seminar, which took place during the second half of our secondment. In addition to the content of our seminar, we also discussed our goals in terms of individual research during our secondments and how to enhance our communication with the PhD students.

One of the most rewarding aspects of my secondment was my interaction with the PhD students. Some of the students, who were still staying at the School's department during their summer term, introduced me to their PhD research as well as their involvement in the PoPMeD-SuSDeV project. Our conversations were inspiring and informative for me, because through them I started to draft the plan of the Slovenian research team for the preparation of the workshop on qualitative methods in 2024. Knowing the intellectual background and knowledge base of the potential participants is crucial for our future preparations of this interdisciplinary workshop. We consider this knowledge as one of the keys for the successful implementation and realisation of the WS.

In the second half of my secondment, Martina Bofulin and I also met with the Spanish PI of the PoPMeD-SuSDeV project, Dr Octasiano Valerio Mendoza, Professor Contratado at the IQS School of Managemet. This was a pivotal meeting that set the tone for our secondment. During the meeting, we discussed our work at the school, our individual research and the presentation we would give at the department seminar. We also set some important goals and actions to promote the PoPMeD-SuSDeV project. These include setting up this blog where visitors can find out about the activities and secondments as well as other topics related to the PoPMeD-SiSDeV project. I have agreed to act as editor of this blog for a period of one year. After that, this task will be transferred to another member of our project team.

Another inspiring and thought-provoking meeting took place with another member of the Spanish project team, Dr Cristina Montañola Sales, a researcher at the IQS School of Management. She presented her research on agent-based modelling (ABM), which she and her research team used to study different policies to be implemented by public health institutions in specific areas under study. This presentation sparked an engaging debate on how this model can be implemented in the PoPMeD-SuSDeV project.

One of the most important events of this summer secondment was the presentation in the research seminar, in which I presented my long-standing anthropological research in Albania. In my seminar presentation entitled "Remitting Values, Reassuring Well-being: Social Entrepreneurship in Albania", I discussed social entrepreneurship in the Albanian capital Tirana. I explained how this small group of socially responsible individuals, in the midst of the prevailing social context of precarity and insecurity, seek to mobilise and transform the passive mindset of the majority of the population. As they work and act in the field of social entrepreneurship, their main objective is not to make a fiscal profit but to contribute to the well-being of society. They aim to achieve this by bringing back and restoring once important social values such as responsibility, trust in oneself and in the community, which were an essential traditional value in pre-communist Albania and part of the unwritten code of law - Kanun. The presentation explained how global neoliberal concepts such as responsibility and trust were translated and understood completely differently in a particular local social and cultural context of Albanian society. Instead of focusing on individual goals and assets, these neoliberal values became entangled with the once important traditional Albanian values that had been almost forgotten through more than four decades of the draconian communist regime (1945-1990), its collapse in 1991 and the introduction of the neoliberal market economy. Overall, this seminar presentation has highlighted two important concepts for the PoPMeD-SuSDeV project: first, the importance of the particular, local social and cultural context, which is crucial for the transmission of the Chinese model of popular medicine to European countries; and second, well-being and its various nuances and meanings in a particular social and cultural context.

One of the final tasks of my secondment was my individual research, dedicated to the development of an interdisciplinary methodology that is based at the intersection of big and thick, ethnographic data. Here I am departing from several years of research collaboration with remote sensing (RS) experts with whom we research sustainability, climate and environmental changes. In doing so, we have developed an intersectional approach combining big, RS and thick ethnographic data. Unlike many research studies that depart from the interdisciplinary methodology, only a few studies set out steps on how to do this in practise. As we explain in our opinion paper to be published in the journal Environmental Science & Policy (during my secondment it was in revision process), we have listed and described the main challenges and through the showcase of ethnographic vignettes and experiences.

In summary, this secondment to the IQS School of Management was an inspiring and remarkable experience that highlighted the importance of academic collaboration and fostered our partnership and knowledge sharing between the Slovenian and Spanish research teams of the PoPMeD-SuSDeV project.

Written by by Dr. Nataša Gregorič Bon (ZRC SAZU)