Dr. Christine Knott and Dr. Madeleine Gustavsson organized two virtual panel sessions on the theme as part of the Association of American Geographer's Annual Meeting that took place on April 7-11, 2021. Also as part of AAG 2021, Dr. Christine Knott and Dr. Nicole Power presented the paper 'Water & Workers: The Mobility and Containment of Ecological and Human Infrastructures in a Bay of Hope & Despair'.

Feminist Futures for the Oceans

Feminist theory has a long history of informing gendered aspects of fisheries and other marine industries– although marginal within the context of marine and fisheries research more broadly. In light of recent shifts from sectoral perspectives to that of understanding the ‘ocean’ in a more holistic light (e.g. embodied in ideas around the Blue Economy), the organizers want to explore feminist futures for the oceans in two sessions on 'Feminist Approaches to Marine Social Sciences'. The first session focuses on situated knowledges at the intersections between (more-than-human) lifeworlds and governance. The second session focuses on methodologies and ways of understanding the inequities of oceans, lives and economies. 

In these two paper sessions we seek to engage with questions related to past, presents and futures of the sea, its governance, those living above and below the sea surface (people, fish and other marine beings), land-sea interactions as well as practical and theoretical questions around the future sustainability and equity of the sea. Papers will include discussions around marine industries, feminist theories of ocean space, marine governance, marine conservation, sustainability, gender relations and the sea as well as more-than-human perspectives and equity/justice issues.

Building on a series of panels on ‘Fishy Feminisms’ at the MARE conference in 2019 where Drs. Knott and Gustavsson sought to explore the fisheries field beyond “gender = women”, these sessions continue this work by exploring various feminist approaches in marine and fisheries contexts more broadly. The sessions, organized as part of Ocean Frontiers Institute’s (OFI) Future Ocean and Coastal Infrastructures (FOCI) project, aim to build a network, to carry out a dialogue across disciplines, methods and frameworks.