The increased visibility of women in and around the ocean reflects women’s central role in producing knowledge about the ocean and developing equitable approaches to engaging with and protecting the ocean. Despite this visibility, though, inequality and discrimination still persist, suppressing female voices and upholding toxic tropes of women as silent, passive, or invisible.
All too often workers are seen as collateral damage in conservation and economic-based management decisions and irrelevant in the production of environmental knowledge used to inform those policy decisions. Perhaps that’s inevitable. But I would argue that workers are an essential aspect of the human dimensions of a fishery, or any maritime-based economy, and need to be systematically incorporated into policy-making—a process made possible by strengthening labor unions.
Ultimately, ocean justice is not only about understanding the disproportionate exposure to environmental harms by marginalized communities but also about acknowledging the unique ways in which these very social groups integrate ocean conservation, science and policy-making in the urban setting.
Introducing the first installment of "Human Dimensions of Oceans: From a Sociological Perspective." While each blog post in this series will have a different emphasis, a running thread will be the idea that advancing equitable outcomes means, in part, learning how to balance a deep respect for scientific knowledge with an understanding that natural science is a fallible enterprise generated through historically specific conditions of production.
