10/07/2017
Blog report from the Mole: MARE conference Day 2
On Day 2 social scientists and interdisciplinary marine scholars, practitioners, and graduate students swam between panel “streams” on myriad topics. Tasked with being the undercover “mole” at this year’s conference, I went deep undercover and sat in on a full days of sessions, tweeting insights out to the world under the MARECentre name in an act of deep espionage. But now that I have “unmasked” I can share my highlights of the day.
The began with a presentation by an ambitious graduate student and it was great to hear more seasoned scholars encouraging this budding researcher at a session on gender and fisheries. Themes of intersectionality, or multiple identities, emerged as we learned about the experiences of migrant women working in fish processing. In this session, I was also reminded of the power and importance of longitudinal work through a study on children from age eight to young adulthood and how place attachment manifested in their childhood experiences and life course.
The theme of life course and the dimension of youth in communities and in the fishing industry continued in later sessions. Presenters discussed new patterns and challenges of fisheries recruitment and participation on both sides of the North Atlantic. The commodification of fisheries and change in access has transformed family relations, incentivized the “retirement account” mindset for fishermen and making it difficult for children in fishing families to take on fishing businesses, even if there was interest. As spoken about in this year’s keynote, increasing mobility, globalization, and neoliberalism have come to be serious drivers with which coastal communities must contend, and as maritime scholars we can make connections to other post-industrial communities to broaden the contributions of our work.
The interdisciplinarity of MARE was also displayed by talks from psychologists, performing arts scholars, ecologists, all of whom presented in sessions alongside MARE’s more typical disciplines of anthropology, sociology, geography, and political science. After a day rich in presentations and the flowing discussions that bubbled up over coffee breaks and lunch, we celebrated our scholarly community at the conference dinner. Having been the third MARE conference I have attended, I must admit that this bi-annual event has come to feel like a family reunion of sorts, where we are linked by the sea and our interest in questioning the global, regional, and local trends than come to influence our research.
Did you already know there was one more than one mole blogging during the MARE conference? Who are the moles?
