Browsing by Subject "Commons"

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    Regulating a mystery: science, colonialism, and the politics of knowing in the pacific halibut commons.
    (2011-02) Richmond, Laurie Shannon
    Recognizing that environmental management is as much about managing people as managing biological resources, researchers in environmental studies have begun to pay increased attention to the human dimensions of natural resources and the environment. However, few of these scholars and managers have focused on the historical context of environmental management and the ways that history shapes people's interactions with natural resource issues. In this dissertation, I utilize a historical approach to examine the experiences of community members from the Alaska Native fishing village of Old Harbor as they interact with the regulatory and knowledge processes of the international Pacific halibut (Hippoglossus stenolepis) fishery. I argue that the colonial history of the United States is perpetuated into the present in the processes that guide the management of fish resources in Alaska. Specifically, I argue that this colonial legacy is exhibited in the politics surrounding Pacific halibut management where Western ways of knowing halibut come to dominate decisions made about the resource while Alaska Native ideas and interests in the fishery are pushed to the periphery. This has required Alaska Native halibut fishermen from communities such as Old Harbor to engage with new forms of natural resource science and management in order to participate in processes governing the use of their local resources. I show that in Old Harbor, the marginalization of local ideas about halibut resources has contributed to significant emotional and material impacts for community members including alienation from regulatory processes that impact their fishing activities and loss of access to fish resources that are essential to their livelihoods. To explore these issues, I employed an interdisciplinary methodology that included ethnographic experience in the community of Old Harbor and the regulatory agencies that manage the fishery, examination of historical and current halibut policy documents, participation in a fisheries science investigation into the growth dynamics of halibut in the waters surrounding Old Harbor, and over 40 interviews and oral histories with Old Harbor community members, halibut managers, and halibut biologists. I examine the interaction between Old Harbor and regulatory agency approaches to three aspects of the halibut resource: (1) Biology - ideas about the biological status of fish stocks and surrounding climate. Fisheries science research conducted with the International Pacific Halibut Commission to examine the changing growth patterns in the annual ring structure of halibut otoliths provides important details about halibut growth patterns and life history characteristics. Discussions with and observations of Old Harbor fishermen show that over the course of a long history of seeking these elusive organisms, community members have developed a number of important ideas about the biology, movements, and change of Kodiak area Pacific halibut. When these two as well as a number of other approaches to halibut biology were brought together in negotiations to develop catch limits for the fishery, Western science approaches to halibut biology tended to dominate the discussions. This domination presented challenges for both indigenous and non-indigenous fishermen who understand the resource in different terms. (2) Place - conceptions and meanings tied to fish in space. Old Harbor fishermen and halibut managers exhibit different approaches to the halibut fishing geography. Top-down spatial decisions made by managers and biologists - about issues ranging from where to place regulatory areas, at what scales to assess halibut, and where to hold policy meetings - have significant impact on the lives and geographies of Old Harbor fishermen. (3) Property rights - understandings of fish ownership. Old Harbor ideas about fish property rights differed in many ways from those inherent in the 1995 Individual Fishing Quota (IFQ) program that privatized the halibut fishery. The import of a private-property system under the IFQ program worked to erode Old Harbor ideas and systems of property rights within their local fisheries. As a result, the IFQ program contributed to a dispossession of Old Harbor's fish resources and to devastating impacts on the livelihoods of community members. Ultimately, this dissertation advocates that historical and geographical perspectives are essential for understanding natural resource issues. A historical orientation reveals a significant colonial legacy and social justice implications inherent in Pacific halibut management. While Western-oriented management of the halibut fishery has often marginalized Old Harbor approaches to fish, Old Harbor fishermen have responded to subvert, resist, and change halibut management processes in efforts to legitimize and institutionalize their own visions for the resource. They have continually brought their history and places to the management forum and never accepted domination by Western agency ideas about fish. Their efforts combined with the perspectives of managers and biologists who are concerned with protecting the resource provide a path towards imagining a form of fishery management that is both ecologically sustainable and socially just.
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    Teaching in Common: Reimagining Curriculum Development in Sustainable Food Systems Education
    (2023-07) Sames, Amanda
    To meet an increasingly complex set of global challenges, undergraduate programs need innovative, well aligned curricula that prepare students to effectively address those challenges. This is especially true in programs such as sustainable food systems education (SFSE) where students learn to think systemically, critically, and reflectively, and act collectively across difference. These developmental skills cannot be achieved in a single course, and thus require curricular cohesion and alignment. For this to happen, instructors in a program must work together to develop a collective understanding of the purpose of the curriculum, the intended student learning outcomes, and how each course contributes to the whole. Using that understanding, instructors must work collaboratively to deliver a coherent curriculum, adjusting their courses as needed and contributing to efforts to update or improve the curriculum. The research described here is the result of action research with three undergraduate SFSE programs working to engage in this kind of curriculum management in their own programs, and in collaboration across programs. First, curriculum mapping, a process of identifying how a program’s learning outcomes are addressed and assessed within and across courses, is explored. Curriculum mapping is a common undertaking in higher education, but descriptions of the specific processes used are hard to find. This work contributes to the literature by describing two highly participatory, instructor-driven methods based on experiences mapping at the University of Minnesota (UMN) and University of British Colombia (UBC). Next, mapping is considered as a process extending beyond the creation of maps to foster deep and productive discussions about curricula. Once created, curriculum maps can function as boundary objects, things that help groups of differently situated actors work across difference, so creating a map should be seen as the start of a larger process rather than an end goal. This research describes facilitated curriculum development workshops at UMN, UBC and Montana State University and observes that relational work, the effort people invest in managing their relationships with others, ideally in mutually growth supporting ways, is fundamental to managing curricula as cohesive wholes. Finally, curricula are theorized as a new kind of commons. Commons are resources shared by a group and subject to social dilemmas, just as curricula are shared resources whose management present challenges to time and resource strapped programs. Curricula posited as contributory commons, which are commons that rely on the willing, active, and ongoing contributions of producers (instructors) to maintain the shared resource (a curriculum). To address the challenges of managing curricula as contributory commons, six interconnected recommendations are offered, calling for investment of time and resources in curricula, and in the collective willingness and ability of instructors in a program to work together for curriculum management and innovation. To think of curricula as commons moves away from academia’s emphasis on individual teaching responsibilities and towards collective pedagogical interdependence, recognizing the importance and value of attending as much to relationships and pedagogy as to scholarly pursuits.