Collapsing fish stocks, gendered economies, and anxieties of entrapment in coastal Sierra Leone

This article explores the economic negotiations between Sierra Leonean fishermen and the women who compete to buy their fish; tracing how relationships of gendered intimacy and interdependence are being reconfigured in a context of deepening economic precarity. Fish stocks in Sierra Leone are in crisis. Fisherfolk look back with nostalgia to a past in which bountiful harvests had made it possible for transactions of fish to be simple and impersonal. Today, by contrast, it is almost impossible for women to access fish without working to develop strong personal relationships with fishermen: deploying gifts of food, loans of money, and even secret ‘medicines’ to secure the loyalty of potential customers. I analyze how men and women reflect on their growing impoverishment through discourses that emphasize their moral ambivalence at being drawn back into webs of interpersonal dependency and argue that these anxieties need to be understood in the context of Sierra Leone’s history of domestic slavery

Becoming an island: making connections and places through waste mobilities

Islands, long portrayed in the western imaginary as remote, static and bounded entities, have increasingly come to be viewed as places constantly in the making: as connected sites formed by complex and shifting relations and assemblages of people and things. This paper considers the role that waste plays in this process through exploration of how discarded and unwanted matter decays, moves and comes to rest in relation to a small island in the Maldives. It shows how thinking about the island through waste and its circulation via the actions of human and non-human agents reveals the ways in which the island is constituted and connected to other places. The paper also examines people’s daily, practical engagements with the island’s waste, and how these ongoing interactions and encounters shape the ways in which the island is being made, materially and aesthetically. In these ways, we show how thinking through waste contributes to how we understand place-making and specifically to the making of islandness

Gendered representations in Hawai‘i’s anti-GMO activism

The aim of this article is to analyse some of the representations of intersectional gender that materialise in activism against genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It uses the case of Hawai‘i as a key node in global transgenic seed production and hotspot for food, land and farming controversies. Based on ethnographic work conducted since 2012, the article suggests some of the ways that gender is represented within movements against GMOs by analysing activist media representations. The article shows how gender, understood intersectionally, informs possibilities for movement-identification, exploring how themes of motherhood, warrior masculinities and sexualised femininities are represented within these movements. The article suggests that some activist representations of gender invoke what could be considered as normative framings of gender similar to those seen in other environmental, food and anti-GMO movements. It is suggested that these gendered representations may influence and limit how different subjects engage with Hawai'i anti-GMO movements. At the same time, contextual, intersectional readings demonstrate the complex histories behind what appear to be gender normative activist representations. Taken together, this emphasis on relative norms of femininities and masculinities may provide anti-GMO organising with familiar social frames that counterbalance otherwise threatening campaigns against (agri)business in the settler state. Understood within these histories, the work that gender does within anti-GMO organising may offer generative examples for thinking through the relationships between gendered representations and situated, indigenous-centred, food and land-based resistances

Forging volumetric methods

The last two decades have seen a “volumetric turn” within Anglophone social sciences and humanities scholarship. This turn is premised on the idea that space may be better understood in three-dimensional terms – with complex heights and depths – rather than as a series of two-dimensional areas or surfaces. While there is an increasingly diverse and rich set of scholarship accounting for voluminous complexities in the air, oceans, ice, mountains, and undergrounds, all too often this work foregrounds state and military-led approaches to volume. This has resulted in a limited methodological toolkit through which to explore voluminous complexities as they emerge and extend beyond military and state contexts. Often reliant on elite interviews, archives, and cartographies, there has been little critical discussion of both methodological practice and the “flatness” of research outputs articulating three-dimensional worlds. In this paper we address this by foregrounding the role of immersive and multisensory methodologies (sounding volumes, seeing-sensing drone volumes, and object volumes). To conclude, we offer avenues for further inquiry, including attending to shifting everyday voluminous experiences in the Anthropocene, and the need to diversify the communication of “volume” research

Localizing Global Climate Change in the Pacific. Knowledge and Response in Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM)

Abstract This paper explores how the idea of climate change travels to the islands of Micronesia and how discourses are translated in radically different ways in local life-worlds. Building on long-term fieldwork in Chuuk, the paper first conceptualizes climate change as a ‘travelling idea’ which takes its departure to the islandscape of Oceania in ‘Western’ island conceptions of ‘insularity’ and feed the ‘vulnerability trajectories’ that turned the islands into the world’s canary for the impact of climate change. It secondly examines why the issue of climate change remains a non-topic or a secondary aspect to many of the islanders, who are simultaneously put at the frontline in the global campaign against global warming. Keywords: Climate Change, Knowledge, Micronesia