TD online course – teaching team

Ratana Chuenpagdee
(TBTI Global, Canada)

Ratana Chuenpagdee is a university researcher professor at Memorial University in St. John’s. She leads the global partnership for small-scale fisheries, Too Big To Ignore (TBTI), which aims at elevating the profile of small-scale fisheries and rectifying their marginalization in national and international policies. Some of the current activities are ‘Blue Justice’ for small-scale fisheries, transdisciplinary capacity training to support the implementation of the SSF Guidelines, and innovative fisheries governance. Ratana also co-leads a research module on informing governance responses in a changing ocean for the Ocean Frontier Institute, another major collaborative research between universities, governments, private sectors and communities.

Evan Andrews
(TBTI Global/OFI, Canada)

Evan Andrews is finishing his PhD at the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability, University of Waterloo. Evan earned his Master of Environment and Sustainability from the University of Saskatchewan and Bachelor of Arts, Justice Studies from the University of Regina. His main research areas address the need to strengthen the governance of social-ecological systems, including coastal fisheries, for their long-term sustainability. He will soon be joining Ocean Frontier Institute, a major collaborative research between universities, governments, private sectors and communities.

Vesna Kereži
(TBTI Global, Canada)

Vesna Kereži is the project manager of the Too Big To Ignore: Global Partnership for Small-Scale Fisheries
Research project. She holds a MSc in the Human Dimensions of Wildlife Management from Memorial
University of Newfoundland, Canada. Her interests lie in natural resource management, human dimensions of
fisheries, and knowledge mobilization and transformation.

Mostafa El Halimi
(MUN, Canada)

Mostafa is pursuing a Master of Environmental Science at Memorial University where his research project assesses the environmental impacts of oil spills from the marine shipping activities in Newfoundland and Labrador. He is originally from Tangier, Morocco.

Alicia Said
MCAST, Malta

Alicia Said is the Director for Fisheries, within the Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture at the Ministry for Fisheries, Agriculture and Animal Rights, Malta. She is responsible for research, policy and strategic development of the fisheries sector. She holds a PhD in Human Ecology from the University of Kent (UK) and has recently finished a post-doctoral fellowship at AMURE- IFREMER, Brest (France). Between 2017 and 2018 she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada. Her research interests include resource governance, socio-economic and socio-ecological resilience, and sustainable livelihoods in the context of small-scale and artisanal fisheries in islands-based fisheries. Alicia has authored various peer-reviewed articles for high impact journals focusing on a diversity of topics related to fisheries. She has delved into the implications of marine policy initiatives on the sustainability of the small-scale fishing sectors as part of her doctoral research. Then, with the Too Big To Ignore Global Partnership for Small-Scale fisheries Research, she has conducted regional and global research on the governance of different fishing communities by fostering the development of a governability index and progressing on a systematic approach towards transdisciplinary fisheries research. Recently she has investigated access to resource matters in the island of Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean, and coordinated an interdisciplinary research project on Mediterranean small-scale fisheries.

Alida Bundy 
DFO, Canada

Brice Trouillet
University of Nantes, France

Brice Trouillet holds a PhD in geography (University of Nantes, France, 2004) where he has been an Associate Professor since 2007. He works within the LETG lab of which he is also a deputy director since 2015. He collaborates with IUML, a large scientific consortium dedicated to marine and coastal researches based in Nantes. Brice is a geographer whose research focuses on the relations between humans and maritime space. Through the lens of science and technology studies and critical approaches, he uses the case of fisheries in marine spatial planning to study how power relations and knowledge issues intertwine in (geo)technological devices (data, types of knowledge, planning documents, mapping features) that ultimately shape ‘socio-technical agencements’, forming an intermediate with the marine ‘environment’.

Derek Johnson
University of Manitoba, Canada

Derek Johnson is an Associate Professor of Socio-cultural Anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a Research Associate at the Centre for Maritime Research at the University of Amsterdam. Derek’s research integrates political ecology and social wellbeing approaches in the analysis of small-scale fisheries governance and cultural economies of food. Since the mid-1990s, his primary geographical area of interest has been South Asia, and particularly the Indian state of Gujarat. Derek led the Diverse Values research cluster and a working group on the social and cultural dimensions of small-scale fisheries within the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council project Too Big to Ignore: Global Partnership for Small-scale Fisheries Research. This volume is an output of those groups.

Eduardo Bello Baltazar
ECOSUR, Mexico

Dr. Bello Baltazar has been a Researcher at ECOSUR since 1997. Trained as an agronomist, he also holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology. Currently, his research interests include socio-environmental processes of conservation, local territory and territorialities, family and community-based ecotourism, and transdisciplinary approaches addressing the viability and sustainability of small-scale production systems. He is a member of ECOSUR’s Research Group for coffee-growing areas in Mexico. From 2009 to 2012, he led a transdisciplinary project and a collaboration network on socio-environmental innovation in southern Mexico.

Eric Thrift
University of Manitoba, Canada

Eric Thrift is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose interests include environmental governance, social-ecological resilience, and the role of cultural diversity in development. His ongoing research addresses mobile pastoralists’ ability to accommodate social and ecological change and uncertainty. By investigating the ways that small-scale adaptive practices are supported or constrained by governance policies or development interventions, Eric’s research engages practitioners and policymakers in promoting social-ecological resilience, biocultural diversity, and well-being as governable development goals. As Principal Investigator of the SSHRC-funded project “Untangling the ethics of ‘sustainable’ cashmere”, Eric is currently working with Mongolian goat herders and other stakeholders to investigate how diverse understandings of “sustainability” come into conflict in the global commodity chain for cashmere.

Eva Coronado 
CINVESTAV, Mexico

Eva Coronado has recently completed her PhD  at the Research Center and Advance Studios of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV), Campus Merida in Mexico, where she studied under the supervision of Dr. Silvia Salas and Dr. Ratana Chuenpagdee. Her doctoral study focuses on evaluating the small-scale fisheries in Yucatan Peninsula based on integral approach and considering three components: a regional typology (considering fleet characteristics), target species, and social organization.

Julia Nakamura
University of Strathclyde, UK 

Julia Nakamura is a lawyer qualified in Brazil, a PhD candidate with the Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance (SCELG) at University of Strathclyde, UK, and an international legal specialist with the Development Law Service of FAO. Julia’s PhD research is about international law for small-scale fisheries, with a focus on participation of the SSF sector in conservation and management of transboundary aquatic species. Julia’s work relates to the implementation of the ecosystem approach to fisheries, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the SSF Guidelines.

José J. Pascual-Fernández
University of La Laguna, Spain

José J. Pascual-Fernández is a Profesor Titular of Social Anthropology at the University of La Laguna (Tenerife) since 1993. His research has been related to fisheries and coastal areas, focusing most recently on governability, MPAs, coastal tourism, fisher organizations, and small-scale fisheries markets. In the last 10 years, he has been involved as principal investigator or researcher in a dozen of competitive projects and a similar number of research contracts. Currently he is the Academic Coordinator of the PhD Program on Law, Society, and Tourism at University of La Laguna.

Katia Frangoudes
University of Brest, Ifremer, CNRS, UMR 6308, AMURE, IUEM, France

Katia Frangoudes is a senior researcher of political sciences. She obtained her PhD at the University of Paris in 1992. Since then she participated in many research programs related to fisheries and aquaculture governance, and women’s contribution in fisheries in Europe as a member of the research team of the UMR AMURE at the University of Brest. For many years she acted as a facilitator of the European fisher’s women network AKTEA. She is currently coordinating the TBTI research cluster on ‘Women and Gender in SSF‘ with several other colleagues.

Luciana Gomes de Araujo
Mexico

Dr. Araujo holds a Ph.D. in Environment and Society from the University of Campinas, Brazil. She chiefly works as a researcher in the Commons Conservation and Management Research Group (University of Campinas, Brazil) and the Forest Governance Research Group (University of São Paulo, Brazil). She currently holds a post-doctoral research position in the Institute of Energy and Environment (University of São Paulo, Brazil). In 2019 she co-authored a book chapter published by Springer in a book titled: Viability and Sustainability of Small-Scale Fisheries in Latin America and The Caribbean, which co-editors are part of the “Too Big To Ignore” project.

Manuel Roberto Parra Vázquez
ECOSUR, Mexico

Dr. Parra Vázquez has been a Researcher at ECOSUR since 1982 and currently is also a part-time Professor at the Chapingo Autonomous University (Mexico). Trained as an agricultural engineer, he holds a Master’s degree in agricultural sciences and a Ph.D. in Economics. His work is aimed at strengthening the capacities of peasant communities through socio-environmental innovations that address problems of Mexico’s Southern Border including both regional and micro-regional scales. It is based on an action-research approach that is practiced with social actors such as community groups, producer organizations, non-governmental organizations, and agencies of the municipal, state, and federal governments.

Maria Pena
CERMES, Barbados

Maria Pena is a project management professional with 16 years’ experience in implementing and managing externally funded marine resource management projects in the wider Caribbean. She conducts associated project research in areas such as socio-economic monitoring at marine protected areas (MPAs) and coastal sites; fisheries management planning; MPA management effectiveness evaluation; marine resource governance; climate change adaptation and disaster risk management in fisheries and aquaculture; and more recently, gender in fisheries. Maria is project officer at the Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies (CERMES) at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus in Barbados. 

Mel Agapito
TBTI Global, Canada

Mel Agapito is a senior research fellow working with TBTI at Memorial University. Melinda’s doctoral research focused on marine protected area planning where she examined social and ecological priorities trade off in geographical space, an approach suited for prioritizing places for conservation. Her previous community-based work in the Philippines allows her to appreciate the importance of both social values and evidence-based information in conservation planning.

Milena Arias-Schreiber
Gothenburg University, Sweden

Milena Arias-Schreiber is a Researcher and Project Leader at the Swedish Institute for the Marine Environment, Gothenburg University, Gothenburg, Sweden. With a background on marine ecology and doctoral studies in the social sciences from the University of Bremen (Germany), her research focuses on institutional challenges for sustainable fisheries management. On this topic, she has worked with commercial anchovy fisheries for fishmeal production in the Peruvian Upwelling Ecosystem and with small-scale fisheries in the Baltic Sea. She is currently doing research and supporting the implementation of the ‘social dimension’ of ecosystem-based fisheries management in Sweden.

Minerva Arce-Ibarra
ECOSUR, Mexico

Dr. Arce Ibara has been a Researcher at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) in Mexico since 1996. Initially trained as a fisheries biologist, her current research interests have expanded to include the commons and community-based conservation, small-scale fisheries, ecological economics, and transdisciplinary approaches to the viability and sustainability of small-scale production systems. She holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary studies from Dalhousie University and is currently involved with the “Community Conservation Research Network” (Saint Mary’s University, Canada) and the “Too Big To Ignore: Global Partnerships for Small Scale Fisheries” (Memorial University, Canada).

Prateep Nayak
University of Waterloo, Canada

Prateep’s  academic background is in political science, environmental studies and  international development. He does transdisciplinary work with an active interest in  combining social and ecological perspectives. Prateep’s research focuses  on the understanding of complex human-environment connections (or  disconnections) with particular attention to change, its drivers, their influence and possible ways to deal with them. His  main areas of expertise and interest include commons, governance,  social-ecological system resilience, wellbeing, environmental justice  and political ecology. Currently, he teaches international development and environment. In the past, Prateep worked as a  development professional in India on issues around community-based  governance of land, water and forests, focusing specifically at the  interface of research, implementation and public policy. Prateep is a past Trudeau Scholar, a Harvard University Fellow in  Sustainability Science, and a recipient of Canada’s Governor General  Academic Gold Medal. Prateep’s forthcoming book is titled “Making Commons Dynamic: Understanding Change through Commonisation and Decommonisation.

Shannon Bower   
Infinity social and ecological solutions

Silvia Salas  
CINVESTAV, Mexico

Silvia Salas is a professor at the Marine Resources Department at Cinvestav Unidad Merida, Mexico. Her background is in Marine Science (Cinvestav, MSc) and Resource Management and Environmental Studies (University of British Columbia, Canada, PhD). She has competence in fisheries bio-economics and management, fleet dynamics and fishing strategies, vulnerability, and risk perception with an emphasis on small-scale fisheries. She has participated as a consultant in several FAO workshops and has collaborated as a member of the advisory committee of the WECAF Region (FAO). Currently she is the representative of Latin America in the IIFET Board
Committee and represents Mexico in NAAFE Board Committee. She is also one of the collaborators in the TBTI partnership.

Svein Jentoft 
The Arctic University of Norway

Svein Jentoft is Professor Emeritus at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. His long career as a social scientist specializing on fisheries management and fisheries communities has yielded numerous articles and books. He has led and been involved in many international projects, working in the Global South as well as in the North. He also has a long time interest in the conditions of indigenous peoples in Nicaragua and his native Norway. In 2018, he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and a ʻFriend of Small-Scale Fisheriesʼ award at the 3^rd World Small-Scale Fisheries Conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Yinji Li 
Tokai University, Japan