School of Humanities & Languages, UNSW Sydney
Date: Wednesday 1 July 2020
Time: 5:00-6:30pm AEST
Zoom Link: https://unsw.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0qduihqT4sE9K5x5LnUFhwTwSXIA1Q4RA2
This is a free event. Contact person: Ayxem Eli (a.eli@unsw.edu.au)
Subsidized, militarized and state-supported fishers of Vietnam and China are at the forefront of the South China Sea dispute. Political scientists and economists have largely assumed that fishers, responding to regulations and incentives, are instruments of their states’ geopolitical agendas. This present-centric approach obscures the actual motivations and modalities of fishers’ expansion of their fishing domains. It also downplays the inter-ethnic networks which connect different fishers beyond state territories and localized fishing grounds in both past and present. Using a combination of ethnography and historiography, this research analyzes how fishers move in and out of legal and illegal, state and non-state categories of fisher, poacher, trader, smuggler, and militia. I argue that these shifting occupational categories are predicated on ethnic networks within and beyond states. They reflect wider interconnections between modern state-supported and technology-driven fisheries with older pre-nation-state patterns of mobility, producing new forms of versatility under the states’ radars.
About the speaker
Edyta Roszko is a social anthropologist and senior researcher at Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway. Her research interests include religion and politics in Vietnam, maritime ‘Silk Roads’, and oceans and seas that emerge as social, political and economic arenas. Funded by European Research Council, her current project Transoceanic Fishers: Multiple Mobilities in and out of the South China Sea (TransOcean), expands her geographic field beyond Vietnam and China to include other global regions in Oceania and West and East Africa. Her monograph Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam is forthcoming in October 2020 with NIAS Press.
Postdoc job opportunity: The TransOcean project will recruit three postdocs to work in Asia, Oceania, and Africa, starting from February 2021. Those interested in being part of the TransOcean team are encouraged to talk to Roszko at the seminar or contact her at edyta.roszko@cmi.no
https://www.cmi.no/news/2481-post-doc-researchers-for-erc-funded-project-on-transoceanic-fishers