AbstractCoastal and marine spaces are emerging as experimental sites of a “Blue” economy that’s aligned with capitalocentric imaginaries of growth and development while also promising futures of ocean health. Critical geographers often critique these approaches as extractive. We ask: how do local communities negotiate this landscape, how do hegemonic approaches to blue economy impact community practices, and what alternatives do they envision? To answer these questions, we ask community leaders from Tamil Nadu and Grand Bahama about their experiences with Blue Economy projects in their regions. In doing so, we methodologically center the lives and livelihoods of two geographically distinct coastal communities with whom session organizers work, to document the diversity in experiences of capitalist change and stories of survival across disparate contexts. Our session is inspired by coastal communities’ alternative understandings of economy, and other modes of inhabiting coastal and marine spaces. As such, we broaden the diverse economic engagements with oceans that are being negotiated as sites of plunder, plenitude and possibility. Specifically, our interlocutors explore: 1) the making and changing contours of community knowledges, 2) the boundaries between ‘capitalist’ aquaculture and ‘non-capitalist’ artisanal fishing, and 3) the building of communities through mangrove restoration after natural disasters.
Guests: Javan Hunt, S. PalayamCERN members: Emily Melvin, Nityanand Jayaraman, Kevin St. Martin, Dhruv Gangadharan
Language: English and Tamil (with English interpretation)
