Noëlle Boucquey

Abstract: Globally, access to wild fishery resources provides essential subsistence protein and livelihood support for millions of people. In urbanized areas of the global north, wild fishery resources--and the act of fishing for them--fulfill a variety of critical and overlapping needs that are not easily categorized as purely subsistence, recreational, or commercial: for food, socializing, cultural traditions, mental health, and connections to the environment and nonhuman species. At the same time, both regulatory and environmental changes can pose challenges to accessing these benefits. Employing a case study of fishing in Tampa Bay, FL, USA, this paper explores the challenges and opportunities involved in accessing wild fishery resources in a large metropolitan area. Using data from in-person surveys, field notes, and newspaper articles, we examine where people fish and how they respond to the shifting accessibility of fishing sites. We trace how access to fishery resources has changed both over the long term and more recently, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit the region in 2024. We probe what limitations to access are most challenging for people, as well as the ways fishers exhibit resilience in the face of these challenges. In doing so, we engage with literature on provisioning fisheries, infrastructures of care, and abundant futures. We find that while fishers are often individually resourceful, a variety of intertwined physical and social infrastructures are important for fostering both individual and community resilience. Most essential are those infrastructures that enable diffuse water access across the region. Particularly post-hurricanes, it is important to focus on rebuilding local shore fishing infrastructures to support easier access to fishery resources and the provisioning benefits they provide. 

Abstract: Florida has some of the highest marine recreational fishing rates in the country and is well known as a recreational fishing “paradise,” where opportunities abound for excellent fishing. However, most estimates suggest that only around 30% of these fishers are women. Raising women’s participation in fishing is a policy goal in Florida and more broadly, since doing so would expose many more to the documented benefits to wellbeing and cross-species connections that fishing provides. In order to shed more light on the pathways women take into fishing (or are dissuaded from fishing), our research examines women’s engagement with recreational fishing in both real-life and online fishing spaces. Drawing on in-situ interviews with women fishers in the Tampa Bay region and social media analysis of women fishers nationally, we discuss the factors that may affect women’s decisions to engage in recreational fishing. Our preliminary findings suggest that while actual fishing experiences are often positive for women, their criteria for what makes a successful fishing trip can differ from men’s. Further, mixed positive and negative messaging on social media may complicate women’s assessment of recreational fishing in terms of its safety for women, attitudes toward new fishers, and levels of skill required to participate.

This chapter applies critical perspectives to the study of ocean data infrastructures. It draws on themes in political ecology, assemblage geographies, and critical infrastructures studies to highlight how to denaturalize ocean data infrastructures, how to reveal the ways ocean territories are imagined through data infrastructures for specific governance purposes, and how data infrastructures might also be used to increase more-than-human care work in ocean governance.

The proliferation of man-made and natural chemicals threatens coastal biota and human health, which is compounded by the potential for synergistic effects among chemicals, as well as the impacts of climate change and other significant environmental stressors. This project is studying a large urbanized estuary on the west coast of Florida, USA (Tampa Bay) to investigate all major classes of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs, e.g., PFAS, pharmaceuticals, UV filters), and a number of contaminants of known concern (CKCs, e.g., banned pesticides, PCBs, PAHs) This study aims to characterize their distribution, concentration, seasonality and the potential threats they pose to wildlife and humans. Target media for analyses include benthic invertebrates (oysters and barnacles), important recreationally caught finfishes (Spotted Sea Trout, Red Drum, Snook and Sheepshead), as well as Bay sediments and wastewaters. The project will pinpoint the sources, origins and fates of such chemicals, describe the decadal-scale depositional histories of contaminants into Bay sediments, and conduct surveys of human sub-populations that may be at particular risk from these chemical pollutants (e.g., subsistence-level fishers). The project also test novel technologies for remediating contaminants in wastewater effluent. These data will be used to inform human risk assessments for consumption of seafood harvested within the Bay. More broadly, results will be used by environmental managers to inform policy and regulatory decision-making with respect to point- and non-point source pollution abatement and the appropriateness of additional public health advisories.

Individuals from many disciplines conduct research to understand the social dimension of recreational fisheries. This diverse inquiry has produced a comprehensive understanding of the behaviours of recreational fishers, the outcomes from fishing, and the relationships among fishers, others, and the natural and human environment. The associated body of research, however, is largely disconnected across disciplines. Our goals here are to help readers understand the similarities and differences among disciplines and to identify opportunities for interdisciplinary-based research on recreational fishers. Before addressing these goals, we begin by answering basic questions: What is a discipline? What are the primary disciplines used to study recreational fishers? And what is the genealogy of research on recreational fishers? Seven key disciplines are then classified by multi-criteria related to both focus and epistemological and methodological approaches. This classification reveals clear connections among: (i) ecological science and resource economics, and to a lesser extent historical ecology; (ii) environmental history and political ecology; and (iii) behavioural economics and social psychology. We next describe and provide possible remedies for barriers that inhibit interdisciplinary research, including different epistemologies, nomenclature, and reward bias. Finally, we highlight opportunities to conduct interdisciplinary research by describing the types of benefits that each discipline can provide when conducting interdisciplinary research on recreational fisheries.

Political ecology, and its core concern with how power shapes social– ecological relationships, has much to offer recreational fisheries analyses. Political ecologists bring critical questions about how different fishers may have uneven access to resources, how particular policy narratives affect fishers, and how fishing communities are entangled with broader social, economic, and ecological processes. We explain the origins, key theoretical tenets, and methodological approaches of the field, describe the ways political ecology theory has been applied to understand recreational fisheries, and explore ways it could be applied in future research and management. With its focus on making visible the often hidden, power-laden relationships that shape the character of recreational fishing in specific places, political ecology investigations reveal the ways recreational fishing grapples with its own role in shifting ecologies and is also interwoven with resource-use conflicts and political movements. We bring our diverse perspectives as academics and fisheries managers to illustrate key moments when the central themes of political ecology have helped us to better understand recreational fisheries dynamics. Finally, we offer a set of best practices for integrating a political ecology perspective into recreational fishing studies.

Central to imagining and working toward alternate futures—futures more abundant, just, and caring than many in our more-than-human midst are experiencing now—is articulating the ways in which our present is already multiple, already pluriversal. Moreover, as academics interested in these ideals, we might consider it our political responsibility to share examples of the pluriverse where we find them. However, calls for illuminating and enacting the pluriverse are sometimes vague about what we can do beyond researching and publicizing important social movements. This paper argues that enrolling theories of care and commoning to examine everyday phenomena can be a powerful move toward identifying and amplifying the pluriverse. Care and commoning both foreground how more-than-human wellbeing is actively nurtured in collective, relational ways. Further, we argue that cities, outwardly prominent manifestations of “universal” capitalism, are in fact rich in pluriversality. The ways in which alternate realities (and possible futures) are performed is of course varied, uneven, and full of struggle. Here, we use a case study of urban fishing to document and amplify such performances as part of the project of moving toward abundant futures. We highlight especially the elements of urban fishing that resist a capitalist culture, namely, claiming time and space for rest, sharing, and connection with more-than-human others. In doing so, we show how the theoretical development of ideas of the pluriverse and abundant futures might be improved with focused empirical work.