John Clare and the Manifold Commons

There are growing and justifiable concerns about the degradation of the planet—the land, sea and atmosphere on which all life depends. While these problems unfold on a global scale they are not evenly distributed, either in terms of cause or effect. This has not stopped powerful and universalizing explanations about why ‘our planet’ is being exhausted, and how ‘we’ must respond with urgent action. One of the effects of this response is that environmental problems are naturalized as empirical facts around which new forms of governance and regulation must emerge. While this technical response might be effective at managing discrete environmental problems it can obscure important questions about the ways in which we produce and reproduce social and natural life. The 18th century was also a period in which the problem of scarcity gave rise to new ways of managing and organizing social and natural life. The naturalization of scarcity was a cornerstone of liberal economics, the intellectual justification for various forms of enclosure and ‘improvement’. One person who challenged this powerful narrative was the poet John Clare (1793-1864). Where liberal economics began with the abstraction of self-interested ‘man’ and finite ‘nature’, Clare began with his own experiences of the world around him. This commitment to the here and now is not to be confused with notions of a ‘pre-modern’ union of human and nature. Rather, Clare’s poetry describes and reveals the many different natures which unfold through ongoing, negotiated and changing relations between people and things. Rather than a fear of limits, the excess of possibilities inherent in this vision of the ‘manifold commons’ provides him, and us, with a different way to imagine and enact alternative forms of social and natural life

Transforming the Fisheries

There is now widespread agreement that fish stocks are severely depleted and fishing activity must be limited. At the same time, the promise of the green economy appears to offer profitable new opportunities for a sustainable seafood industry. What do these seemingly contradictory ideas of natural limits and green growth mean in practice? What do they tell us more generally about current transformations to the way nature is valued and managed? And who suffers and who benefits from these new ecological arrangements? Far from abstract policy considerations, Patrick Bresnihan shows how new approaches to environmental management are transforming the fisheries and generating novel forms of exclusion in the process.Transforming the Fisheries examines how scientific, economic, and regulatory responses to the problem of overfishing have changed over the past twenty years. Based on fieldwork in a commercial fishing port in Ireland, Bresnihan weaves together ethnography, science, history, and social theory to explore the changing relationships between knowledge, nature, and the market. For Bresnihan, many of the key concepts that govern contemporary environmental thinking—such as scarcity, sustainability, the commons, and enclosure—should be reconsidered in light of the collapse of global fish stocks and the different ways this problem is being addressed. Only by considering these concepts anew can we begin to reinvent the ecological commons we need for the future

Water, our relative: trauma, healing and hydropolitics

In response to austerity-led reforms of the Irish water sector implemented in 2014, a broad-based, popular movement mobilized and ultimately forced a reversal of these reforms two years later. At least in the formal, public debates, the main contention centered on how water services should be financed and controlled. This is not unique to the Irish case. As campaigns across the world testify, debates over ownership, financing, control and ultimately access to water services are often at the heart of water politics. Without sidelining these important campaigns and movements, this paper calls for other ways of imagining and doing water politics that begin by paying greater attention to water and our complex, uneven, and damaged relations with it. The article draws on inputs and discussions that arose during the day-long ‘Thinkery’ that gave rise to this Special Issue (organized in June 2017 in the University College Cork), as well as ongoing research with rural Group Water Schemes (GWSs) in Ireland. The non-spectacular forms of activism practised by some GWSs invites a form of hydropolitics that doesn’t shy away from the toxic legacies that accrete and materialize (unevenly) in different water bodies. Drawing on the important contributions of Chas Jewett in the ‘Thinkery’, the terms trauma and healing take on an important force for re-directing the energies, assumptions and intentions of more familiar forms of water politics

From land to sea: unsettling subjectivities

In this paper I trace an important conceptual shift which emerged during my fieldwork with fishermen in the South West of Ireland. I begin by describing how my role as a social researcher was interpreted as a valuable 'bridge' between different (epistemological) positions,namely the fishermen and scientists. This approach rests on the belief that individual actors occupy discrete subject-positions capable of being articulated and understood within consensus-making processes. Going to sea marked, for me, a literal and metaphorical departure from this understanding. Rather than thinking of fishermen as bounded, individual subjects acting on and in a 'dumb' external world, and thus having a 'position' from which to make themselves understood, I began to attend to experiences which extended across and between people, places and things. In part two I analyze how the concept of 'continuous experience' helps us to think about experience as relational and contingent, unsettling the (governing) call to identify one's position. Attending to the ways in which experience unfolds through the immediate mattering of relations between people, places and things also allows us to move beyond explanatory modes which seek to identify how subjects are produced through particular structuring relations. In the final part of the paper I describe how the excess of sociability can suspend normal roles and relations, including those which exist between 'researcher' and 'subject'

Listening to experience: the narratives of a Zimbabwean migrant living and working in Cape Town

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.This study explored the experiences of Tendai, a 50 year old migrant from Zimbabwe currently living and working in Cape Town. The approach adopted was that of narrative inquiry, an approach to research that advocates open and informal interviewing and brings theory into conversation with stories as opposed to using it as a kind of structuring framework. The field work for this study was carried out over a period of 4 moths. Interviews were held in Tendai's home in Khayelitsha and were recorded and transcribed, along with detailed field notes

From land to sea: unsettling subjectivities

In this paper I trace an important conceptual shift which emerged during my fieldwork with fishermen in the South West of Ireland. I begin by describing how my role as a social researcher was interpreted as a valuable 'bridge' between different (epistemological) positions,namely the fishermen and scientists. This approach rests on the belief that individual actors occupy discrete subject-positions capable of being articulated and understood within consensus-making processes. Going to sea marked, for me, a literal and metaphorical departure from this understanding. Rather than thinking of fishermen as bounded, individual subjects acting on and in a 'dumb' external world, and thus having a 'position' from which to make themselves understood, I began to attend to experiences which extended across and between people, places and things. In part two I analyze how the concept of 'continuous experience' helps us to think about experience as relational and contingent, unsettling the (governing) call to identify one's position. Attending to the ways in which experience unfolds through the immediate mattering of relations between people, places and things also allows us to move beyond explanatory modes which seek to identify how subjects are produced through particular structuring relations. In the final part of the paper I describe how the excess of sociability can suspend normal roles and relations, including those which exist between 'researcher' and 'subject'