Weekly Oceans and Fisheries Seminars

Dr. Jess Sparks is Associate Director of the University of Nottingham Rights Lab (Ecosystems and the Environment Programme), Assistant Professor of Antislavery Ecosystems in the School of Geography, and Nottingham Research Fellow. Her research focuses on conceptualizing and quantifying the processes and interconnections that facilitate a modern slavery - environmental degradation - climate change nexus specifically in fisheries, agriculture, and forestry. Her research uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods to student these bi-directional and non-linear links through a social-ecological systems approach.

Investigative journalism and emerging scholarly research have posited links between fish stock declines and poor working conditions including modern slavery. However, in the rush to solutions to end such atrocities this relationship is often oversimplified and the Global South almost exclusively spotlighted. This oversimplification is also compounded by a paucity of data, the inaccessibility of exploited fishers hidden away at sea, and a lack of international consensus on defining, identifying, and using the term modern slavery. This talk will unpack these challenges while presenting and critiquing evidence on the multidirectional and non-linear relationships between fish stock declines and working conditions, specifically highlighting the processes that facilitate these interconnections across a multitude of geographies.

Dr. Andrea Reid is a citizen of the Nisga’a Nation and an incoming Assistant Professor with the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries (starting January 2021). There, she will help lead the Indigenous Fisheries Research Unit, working to build a national and international hub for the study and protection of culturally significant fish and fisheries. Her research program adopts highly interdisciplinary and applied approaches to improving our understanding of the complex interrelationships between fish, people and place. Reid’s PhD in Biology (Carleton University ’20) centred on multiple stressor effects on Pacific salmon, using tools and insights from Western and Indigenous sciences in tandem. Reid is a cofounder of Riparia, a Canadian charity that connects diverse young women with science on the water to grow the next generation of water protectors. She is also a National Geographic Explorer (Grantee ’12,’15,’16,’19) and a Fellow of The Explorers Club (FI’19).

Increasingly, fisheries researchers and managers seek or are compelled to “bridge” Indigenous knowledge systems with Western scientific approaches to understanding and governing fisheries. Here, we will move beyond the all-too-common narrative about integrating or incorporating (too often used as euphemisms for assimilating) other knowledge systems into Western science, instead building an ethic of knowledge coexistence and complementarity in knowledge generation using Two-Eyed Seeing as a guiding framework. Two-Eyed Seeing (Etuaptmumk in Mi’kmaw) embraces “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all”, as envisaged by Mi’kmaw Elder Dr. Albert Marshall. In this talk, we will examine the notion of knowledge dichotomies as well as imperatives for knowledge coexistence and draw parallels between Two-Eyed Seeing and other analogous Indigenous frameworks from around the world. We will explore its operationalization through Canadian-based aquatic and fisheries case studies that co-develop questions, document and mobilize multiple knowledges, and co-produce insights and decisions. In sum, we will see how Two-Eyed Seeing creates a pathway to a plural coexistence, where time-tested Indigenous knowledge systems can be paired with, not subsumed by, Western scientific insights for an equitable and sustainable future.