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A-17/22 Feminist and gender research in Norwegian farming and forestry (landbruk) contexts: Past and future directions

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Summary

Writers: Madeleine Gustavsson and Maja Farstad
Much feminist rural geography to date has centred on understanding gender issues in rural space. Norwegian scholars have been leading the way in identifying new themes and approaches to examining the positions of women and men on farms and in farming communities, which has contributed to important contextual knowledge of gender relations on Norwegian farms, as well as conceptual understandings of farming lives more broadly. The article has the same objective. The authors review the extensive body of literature and identify themes, trajectories, approaches, and concepts used since the 1990s. They find that there were three main periods: 1990s to 1997, with early work that sought to describe gender roles; 1994–2005, when constructivist approaches were used; and the mid-2000s onwards, when researchers ‘branched out’ to study more specific themes. To encourage a widening of feminist perspectives in Norwegian farming and forestry, the authors suggest taking up (1) an intersectional approach in attending to gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and ability, (2) a decolonial approach, and (3) a focus on the ‘green transition’. They conclude that, together, these could help to address pressing issues relating to equity, sustainability, and the future of agriculture and forestry in Norwegian contexts.

Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, Volume 76, 2022 - Issue 5, Pages 286-299, https://doi.org/10.1080/00291951.2022.2156920

A-14/22 Introduction to fishy feminisms: feminist analysis of fishery places

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Writers: Christine Knott and Madeleine Gustavsson

Both fisheries and feminism have been the subject of much research spanning academic disciplines and topics for many years. The papers in this themed issue are considered ‘fishy’ in the sense that they are both about fisheries and fish in diverse places, but also because they use a feminist lens, and feminism is often taken as something suspicious that can be doubted by virtue of the social bias associated with the term. Feminism has long offered an understanding of how patriarchal frameworks are embedded within larger structures of societies that maintain social inequities. In their various papers, the authors bring critical insight to under-standing the significance of feminist research and its poten-tial for understanding the connections between place and the future of our relationship with oceans and marine eco-systems. This themed issue contributes to a hopefully grow-ing interest in feminist insights to fisheries and ocean/maritime spaces, and addresses more broadly, the argument that (feminist) geography has remained ‘land-locked’.
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2022.2135492  

A-1/22 Recognizing Women’s Wellbeing and Contribution to Social Resilience in Fisheries

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Writers: Lucy Szaboova, Madeleine Gustavsson & Rachel Turner
Building social resilience is important for fishing communities, whichglobally face unprecedented social and environmental change. Whilewomen’s direct and indirect contribution to fishing economies isincreasingly recognized, their contribution to the social resilience offisheries remains under-examined. Using interview and focus groupdata, we investigate women’s role in supporting the social resilienceof UK fishing communities and examine implications for women’swellbeing. Our findings reveal that beyond supporting the economicviability of fishing businesses, women help maintain the social fabricof fisheries and nurture the physical and mental wellbeing of fishingfamilies, often at a cost to their own material, social and emotionalwellbeing. Tensions between social resilience at the household orcommunity level and women’s individual wellbeing have importantimplications for fisheries policy, which rarely considers the widersocial context of fisheries. We identify ways in which women’s rolesand wellbeing can be included in decision-making and policy.
Society & Natural Resources, Pages 59-74. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2021.2022259

A-18/21 Gender and Blue Justice in Small-Scale Fisheries Governance

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This paper examines the need to embed gender in an empirical examination or conceptual use of Blue Justice. In developing the Blue Justice concept, there is a need to avoid reproducing ongoing and historical omissions of gender issues in small-scale fisheries governance and research. By drawing on the concepts of procedural and distributive justice, this paper explores how gender equity and equality and Blue Justice concerns interrelate, inform and shape each other in fisheries governance. These issues are explored through an analysis of four cases: Zanzibar, Tanzania, Chile, France and the United Kingdom (UK). We find that gendered power inequities in fisheries and women’s marginalised participation in fisheries governance are associated with procedural injustices. These further shape the distributive outcomes in fisheries governance. We argue that any effort to integrate gender into Blue Justice has to address the way that power relations are gendered in a particular fishery – extending the focus beyond the sea and including issues and concerns that are not always included in traditional fisheries governance arrangements revolving around fish resource management.

A-9/21 The invisible (woman) entrepreneur? Shifting the discourse from fisheries diversification to entrepreneurship

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In response to ongoing economic downturns in the small-scale fishing sector, there have been calls for fishing businesses to add value to fishing catches. Whilst such activities would have gendered implications, such proposals often do not consider the gendered contexts in which entrepreneurship is placed, nor how this form of entrepreneurship works for the women involved. The paper draws on in-depth narrative interviews with women in fishing families in England and Wales who have started, initiated or explored entrepreneurial opportunities to examine i) whether entrepreneurship enables a (re)negotiation of gender relations within families and ii) how entrepreneurship develops over the lifecourse. The research is conceptually framed through the literature on women’s ‘entrepreneurship’, family embedded perspectives of entrepreneurship, ‘Mumpreneurship’ combined with a lifecourse approach. I found that although women’s traditional invisibility often became reproduced through their entrepreneurship in fishing family contexts, women’s fisheries entrepreneurship challenged traditional gender relations. In becoming entrepreneurs women negotiated their entrepreneurship with other gendered roles, such as motherhood, over the lifecourse. I argue that shifting the discourse from fisheries diversification to entrepreneurship make it possible to take women seriously by fully viewing them as fisheries workers in their own right in both research and policy. Sociologia Ruralis, doi:10.1111/soru.12343

Researching People and the Sea: Methodologies and Traditions

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In this unique edited collection, social scientists reflect upon and openly share insights gathered from researching people and the sea. Understanding how people use, relate to and interact with coastal and marine environments has never been more important, with social scientists having an increasingly vital contribution to make. Yet practical experiences in deploying social science approaches in this field are typically hidden away in field notes and unpublished doctoral manuscripts, with the opportunity for shared learning that comes from doing research often missed. There is a need for reflection on how social science knowledge is produced. This collection presents experiences from the field, its necessary reflexivity and innovation in methods, and the challenges and opportunities of translating across disciplines and policy. It brings to light the tacit expertise needed to study people and the sea and offers lessons which readers could employ in their own research. With a focus on the future direction of marine social sciences, the volume is highly relevant to masters and doctoral students and more experienced researchers engaged in studying people and the sea, as well as policy makers, practitioners and scientists wishing to understand the social dimension of marine and coastal environments. Forlag: Palgrave Macmillan

A-1/21 Women’s belongings in UK fisheries

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Research on gender in fisheries often argue that women’s contributions are important to the functioning of fisheries and are worthy of recognition. However, this has so far failed to consider how women experience and practice belonging to fisheries. This paper structures the analysis of women’s narratives around three conceptualisations of belonging: i) how women perform place-belongingness; ii) the politics of belonging; and iii) more-than-human co-constructions of belongings. To develop the conceptual approach, the paper synthesises these three concepts with an understanding of belonging as fluid and adaptable to particular situated relationships. In doing so, the paper explores how women’s gendered belongings are co-constructed and performed in the male-oriented UK fisheries contexts. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews, the paper finds that women’s practices of belonging make and maintain fishing communities and places, and that women’s practices of belonging both confirm and challenge longstanding notions of who belongs in the fishery – with women fishers challenging socio-spatial exclusions in fishing. Women’s belongings in fishing were further co-constructed in relation to the more-than-human such as fishing materialities, smells, non-human animals and the ocean. The concept of belonging helps to highlight the processes of becoming with fish, fishing and the fishery – even when there are no clear identities and identifications available for the women involved. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2021.1873748