Research Seminar in Anthropology with María Hernández Carretero

  • Date: 25 September 2024, 10:15–12:00
  • Location: English Park, ENG 3-2028
  • Type: Seminar
  • Lecturer: María Hernández Carretero
  • Organiser: Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
  • Contact person: Jennifer Lorin

María Hernández Carretero from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid/Madrid Institute for Advanced Study presents: Follow the Fish? Of ocean grabbing and maritime migration between Africa and Europe

María Hernández Carretero

Abstract:

With 700 kilometers of coastline, Senegal’s culture and economy are intimately connected to the ocean. Fish crowns the country’s most iconic dish, cëebu jën, and the country itself is said to be named after the traditional fishing boat: the gaal, or pirogue. Nowadays, however, traditional fishers’ catch is dwindling, and pirogues are increasingly used not to go fishing but to make the dangerous sea journey to the Spanish Canary Islands. Spain is the destination not only of disenchanted youths – many of them fishermen and others from coastal areas – but also of a large share of the fish caught in their country’s waters by large, industrial trawlers that locals blame for the decimation of fish banks. Once in Spain, however, migrants are less welcome than their fish: some are deported; many are given unfulfilled expulsion orders and effectively irregularised: allowed to stay without formal authorization nor rights to reside or work, thus vulnerable to precarity and labour exploitation.

Drawing from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Senegal and Spain, and situating at the core of the analysis the ocean’s duality as a source of life and loss, a space of closure and connection, I reflect on how value, exclusion and exploitability are produced in the Anthropocene. I explore how certain lives (human, oceanic) are produced as worthy of economic exploitation, but not of rights and protection. The oceanic waters from which both fish and migrants originate serves as a prism through which to analyse the interconnections between the exploitation of nature and humans.

 

María Hernández Carretero is Tomás y Valiente Fellow at the Madrid Institute of Advanced Studies (MIAS) and the Department of Social Anthropology of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where she is a researcher and lecturer. She has previously been engaged as postdoctoral fellow at the School of Advanced Hispanic and Iberian Studies at Casa de Velázquez in Madrid and at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Oslo, and as doctoral researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Ethnographically anchored in Senegal, Spain and Norway, her research has addressed migration flows and migration management policies, borders and bordering, inclusion and exclusion, belonging, civil society engagement with newcomers, and the transnational social dynamics that tie migrants with their close ones across borders. Her current work focuses on the relationship between transnational natural resource extractivism and intercontinental migration, centered on the case of foreign fish extraction in Senegal and transoceanic migration towards Europe. She has published in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, Human Organization, The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations and with Routledge.

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