(En)Gendering Change in Small-scale Fisheries and Fishing Communities in a Globalized World
Panel organizers
Katia Frangoudes, AMURE, Institut Universitaire Européen de la Mer (IUEM), Brest, France
Siri Gerrard, Centre for Women's and Gender Research, University of Tromsø, Norway
Danika Kleiber, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and WorldFish, Australia
On June 27th, TBTI members Katia Frangoudes, Siri Gerrard and Danika Kleiber organized a special session at the MARE 'People and the Sea' Conference 2019 titled '(En)Gendering Change in Small-scale Fisheries and Fishing Communities in a Globalized World'. All three organizers are coordinators of the TBTI ‘Women and Gender’ research cluster.
This session showcased several papers from the Maritime Studies (MAST) special issue on ‘(En)Gendering Change in Small-scale Fisheries and Fishing Communities in a Globalized World’, developed through the ‘Women and Gender’ research cluster. The special issues discusses global topics on women and gender in fisheries, addressing intersecting topics such as labour, migration organizations, participation in the public sphere, property rights in fisheries and aquaculture, climate change, and capacity building. The first special issue was published in November 2018 and the second issue is planned for the end of August 2019.
The session at the MARE conference highlighted, among others, a new project ‘PERICLES’ (Coastal Cultural heritage) focusing on women/wives contribution to promoting oyster farming as an intangible heritage. The session also included a presentation about the issues facing wives of newly recruited fishers in Japan, as well as a talk about the social transformations in fisheries communities in four northwestern European countries. The latter study documented the lack of social relations in many of the studied communities, except in those places where women networks are presents.
The concluding talk discussed the status of women who fish in Norway since 1990, the year in which the Norwegian fish quota system for the coastal fleet was launched. It showed the regional distribution of the women fishers as well as access for women boat-owners to fish quotas in the open and closed group. Applying the gender lens fulfilled the objective of increasing knowledge about women fisher’s in Norway.
