This doctoral dissertation project is about economic globalization in fishing communities and how gender relationships in households shape the processes that provision the global fish supply chain. Fishing production networks are increasingly integrated into the global economy as consumer demand for fish grows in North America, Europe and Asia. Investigating how such globalization impacts the ways in which men and women relate to one another has important implications for understanding how people affect their environments and access natural resources. This research will address the gender dimension of fishing communities, an element currently missing in the understandings of intensified fishing efforts. It will contribute to knowledge on conservation and development studies, livelihoods research, and political ecology. By considering fisher communities in Senegal, West Africa, where fishing economies have historically displayed highly gendered divisions of labor, this research will investigate the conjugal contracts in fishing households to better understand how these are being reformulated in an era of greater global integration. The research will be accomplished through twelve months of intensive ethnographically-based fieldwork that includes participant observation and semi-structured interviews in coastal Senegal, a major fishing nation and recipient of US-sponsored foreign aid.
This project will include the training and employment of two local research assistants in the course of the research and plans are in places for broad dissemination. In addition to standard academic dissemination, the PIs are planning to develop policy briefing papers targeted at policy-makers and industry professionals, and they are also planning on making media presentations in order to publicize the research beyond the immediate study area. This way industry professionals will be provided with information that will contribute to more effective planning and implementation strategies for managing a dynamic fishing industry. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this project will also provide support to enable a graduate student to establish an independent research career.
This research has engaged ongoing and long-standing scholarly debates in three major ways. First, it has advanced theory in gender-environment research and gender geographies more broadly by conceptualizing gender as one of many intersecting social differences that matter when it comes to determining who has access to natural resources. Second, the project has contributed to the sub-field of feminist political ecology by theorizing nature’s neoliberalization with a gender lens. Third, examining the social and economic relations of Senegalese fish production has highlighted the importance of households in production, social reproduction and consumption processes that shape and are shaped by economic and environmental processes. Through a regional level workshop to which fishing ministry officials, NGO workers and key fishing actors were invited, findings were disseminated to those directly involved in fisheries conservation, management and development efforts in Senegal. Presenting the research's key findings highlighted the changing roles of women in the artisanal fish processing sector over the past fifteen years and engaged representatives of these communities in a question and answer session, giving voice to those often silenced in policymaking discussions. Two reports were written for the study’s host institution, USAID/COMFISH, and other major donors in-country. The first, entitled Gear, family and demographic characteristics of boat owners in Joal, presented the major findings of a survey conducted with boat owners. The second, entitled The potential impact of fishmeal factories on female fish processors’ ability to access fish in Joal-Fadiouth, examined the history of fish preservation to reflect on the changes that globalization of the sardinella chain might entail.
