Call for Papers
Contemporary perspectives on environmental and ecological knowledge in marine contexts
American Anthropological Association (AAA)
Annual Meeting 2015, Denver, CO
November 18-22, 2015
Panel Organizers: Mads Solberg (University of Bergen, Norway), Michael Vina (University of Bergen)
The session considers Fredrik Barth's much quoted call for more comparative anthropological studies of knowledge in the Sidney W. Mintz ' Memorial Lecture in 2000. It does so by focusing on the particular domain of environmental and ecological knowledge in marine contexts. The session will examine how this domain of inquiry has evolved over the 15 years having passed since Barth’s original formulation that “knowledge always has three faces: a substantive corpus of assertions, a range of media of representation, and a social organization”. The session will focus on theory-development and empirical findings in ethnographically informed, comparative studies of knowledge about marine ecology and environment. Both cognitive and political-economic studies of knowledge transactions are relevant to this panel, in line with Barth’s original solicitation. We want to gather both younger PhD-candidates and more established scholars as participants.
The session seeks to bring together researchers working toward developing multifaceted and integrated approaches on dimensions of environmental and ecological knowledge. Our work examines how mottled forms of knowledge concerning fish, technological innovation, conservation, and environmental change become intertwined. The panel seeks to explore knowledge production as the intersection of cognition, materiality, and practice, highlighting the importance of improvised, fluid, and dynamic dimensions of local environmental knowledge. We are particularly interested in examining the production, circulation, and transformation of environmental knowledge and practices that emerge from the daily engagement with human and nonhuman components of the seascape/landscape, and across different communities of practice. Interest in knowledge dynamics can be centered on extended, long-term everyday relations with the environment, or focus on contexts of relatively rapid and intense events such as El Niño-events, earthquakes, or hurricanes, and how such events spur new knowledge in the context of agitated and rapidly changing socio-ecological conditions.
The panel also welcomes ethnographic contributions that help to understand the conflicts that surface when overlapping, but contradictory, epistemologies related to understandings and relations with the marine environment intermingle. We welcome ethnographic contributions from political ecology, cognitive anthropology, ethnoecology, traditional ecological knowledge, multispecies ethnography, and maritime anthropology. Interdisciplinary work is welcome.
We hope that contributors will address thought-provoking questions and topics such as:
* Whose knowledges and epistemologies are employed to work toward problems and solutions in marine resource management, technological innovation, and conservation?
* In what ways do different understandings of nature and resource management affect fishers and scientists’ practices and relations with marine life?
* What are the unique epistemic challenges of research on marine resources and technological innovation?
* How is local ecological knowledge deployed to respond to observed environmental changes?
* How do conflict, cooperation and contested knowledges produce new spatial relations and linkages?
* What are possible directions both methodologically and theoretically for further scholarly engagement?
* Contested relations between different actors in applied knowledge production and organization.
* Marine resource access and distribution, cooperative and conflictive interactions between different fishing sectors.
* Shifting livelihood strategies in fishing communities and informal/formal marine resource management.
* Adaptation to environmental change and environmental risks in marine environments.
We welcome abstract submissions of 250 words (maximum) via email to Mads Solberg ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and/or Michael Vina ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by April 10, 2015. Please include a title for your submission and name of author(s).
NB: Keep in mind that participating anthropologists living in the US/Canada must have a membership with the AAA and valid registration for the conference. Anthropologists from outside the US/Canada are eligble for membership exemption. Participants must register for the conference, pay their registration fees and upload their abstracts within April 15, 2015 (earlier is better).
Cheers,
Mads Solberg
Doctoral fellow
Anthropology
University of Bergen
http://www.uib.no/en/persons/Mads.Solberg
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