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Abstract:
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"Small-scale fishing is one of the oldest and enduring human livelihood activities. Yet, small-scale fisheries persist not as a historical anachronism, but an important part of global food production and human well-being: the sector continues to land nearly half of the world's seafood while employing the majority of the labor in fisheries. While small-scale fisheries are both a traditional and enduring livelihood of global importance, their diversity makes them difficult to define. Yet, a volume of scientific research on small-scale fisheries exists, producing authoritative knowledge about what they are and how they should be managed that in turn shapes policies and access to resources. This research explores the dominant discursive patterns present in the scientific literature on small-scale fisheries drawing on a database of over 2,600 peer reviewed articles published between 1960-2016. Through a narrative analysis of over 250 articles, this preliminary research reveals a relatively stable and shared scientific definition of small-scale fisheries that focuses on certain elements of fishing technology. This research aims to reveal the myths and assumptions embedded in the dominant or hegemonic definition of small-scale fisheries and their problematic effects. Specifically, we highlight how the emphasis on technology reduces the complexity of small-scale fisheries to a few a knowable elements—boats, engines, and fishing gear—rendering small-scale fisheries legible and amenable to scientific study. The emphasis on technology occludes the intersectional forces of other land-based technologies, labor, and nature that co-constitute small-scale fisheries. Notably, this limited emphasis on technologies predominantly used for fishing at sea excludes processes and labor that occur on land, imparting a gendered bias in the definition and reifying the land-sea divide. The stability of the technological definition creates a narrative of small-scale fisheries as a particular technological-environmental problem to be solved while dis-embedding these practices from their entanglements with the social, political-economic, and environmental assemblages which relationally shape them."
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