A multi-species, multi-sited ethnography of Scottish marine livelihood

I will carry out participant observation at conferences and meetings with policy-makers and industry actors in order to gain ethnographic insights into the politics and economics behind the lived experience of my sea-going informants. This will be supplemented with interviews with fisheries biologists, fishers, members of the local community, as well activists who have been working on aquaculture, in order to gain a sense of the different natural worlds inhabited by different actors involved with whom intensive ethnographic fieldwork will not be possible. In order to examine attempts to redefine human-animal relations in aquaculture, I will pay special attention to seal management practices. The traditional practice of shooting seals to protect fish stock was been outlawed for a period and then reintroduced in a highly regulated manner that requires its practitioners to be proficient in the relevant mainstream ecological science. I intend to undertake the PDA in Seal Management myself in order to undergo the same processes required of designated seal management operatives. This will provide me with invaluable insights into the kinds of interspecies relationships and environmental consciousness that are officially sanctioned by the state, thus allowing me to assess the extent to which traditional environmental understandings are different from, resilient or susceptible to policy and education.
This research addresses an issue which has serious implications for the future of marine livelihoods in Scotland as the level and nature of environmental awareness of resource users will determine to a large extent the ongoing viability of those resources and the communities dependent on them. The focus on aquaculture is also important given the lack of social science studies of the industry in Scotland. By studying aquaculture in the context of Scotland's marine industries as a whole, this project provides long-overdue understandings of where aquaculture fits in with the past, present and future of Scottish marine livelihoods. This will be crucial for policy-makers as the UK negotiates its transition out of the EU and explores the possibilities of independent marine and environmental regulation, as a thorough understanding of stakeholders' circumstances will lead to more robust, equitable and sustainable policy. Theoretically, the project makes a number of important contributions to the field. Drawing on the idea of multiple natures, I offer a test of whether cosmologies research can be useful in understanding Western modernity, to which it is rarely applied. I add a Scottish perspective to the growing field of multispecies ethnography and a test to post-human critiques of modernity in an applied setting. In drawing from theories which critique the land-locked certainties of the nature-culture divide, the project provides an opportunity to interrogate the separation of resource users from living resources. It examines the political claims that aquaculture represents a severance of relationships between man and nature through a neoliberal commons enclosure, thus putting these theoretical claims under empirical scrutiny. It asks whether neoliberal aquaculture can really be conceptualised as a one-way process of humans modifying animals or if the agency of nature complicates the conceptual nature-culture hierarchy at the heart of this critique.