Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Gender and Fishing Practices in a Cosmopolitan Littoral

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University of Michigan doctoral student Jennifer Lee Johnson, supervised by Dr. Rebecca Hardin, will investigate the gendered practices and politics of working with and managing fish in Uganda's fisheries. Focusing on Lake Victoria (Nyanja), this project is guided by the overarching proposition that women are, and have long been, crucial to sustaining fisheries-related economies. Though women's work sustains a socially and ecologically cosmopolitan Nyanja, accounts and analyses of their role in fisheries have been virtually invisible in the environmental history, economic anthropology, and managerial science of this lake, as in studies of many other freshwater and marine fisheries. This research seeks to contribute findings that will partially fill this gap.The Co-PI will conduct 15 months of fieldwork in Uganda, investigating how a shifting and gendered set of vernacular fisheries practices are intimately bound up in the politics of comfort, commerce and control along Uganda's shore (or "littoral") areas. She will employ multiple social science research methods, including: participant observation at selected littoral sites, in markets, and in formal managerial settings; career history interviews with a purposeful sample of women and men who work with fish; oral history interviews with elders residing at littoral sites; discourse analysis of the 'received wisdoms' recounted in scholarly, professional, media and archival sources; and descriptive GIS mapping of diverse fisheries supply chains. Findings from this study will advance the scientific understanding of social-ecological interactions in historically and contemporarily dynamic resource-interdependent societies. This study's focus on how fisheries-related economies produce particular kinds of protein and income and create gendered relationships of interdependence and social difference within and across nation states will contribute to environmental anthropology, the anthropology of Africa, and the growing field of multi-species ethnography. By developing concepts of vernacular practice and littoral politics, this study will also make important theoretical and methodological contributions to contemporary debates in technical resource governance and sustainability and development studies more broadly. Funding for this research also supports the training of a social scientist.