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Paper Short Abstract

This paper explores how discarded fishing nets and pirogues along Senegal’s coast persist beyond use - repurposed in protest, care, and art. Tracing their afterlives, it examines how oceanic materials “shift gear” and shape a politics of endurance amid ecological and economic change.

Paper Abstract

This paper explores the multiple - and afterlives - of oceanic gear, specifically fishing nets and artisanal pirogues, along Senegal’s Atlantic coast, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Bargny and Dakar (2024–2025). Even in broken or discarded form, these materials remain present and active: reappearing in everyday practices, protest actions, and artistic interventions.

Monofilament nets, though officially banned, are widely used and continually repurposed - as washing tools, makeshift sea barriers, or activist costumes. Pirogue fragments, by contrast, are more often left behind: as markers of overfishing, disrupted livelihoods, or failed migration, yet also taken up as playgrounds on the beach or reworked into art installations in galleries. These divergent trajectories reveal a coastal politics of persistence shaped by environmental degradation, material improvisation, and memory.

Drawing on theories of endurance and duress (Stoler 2016), vibrant matter (Bennett 2010), and oceanic excess (Peters and Steinberg 2019), I examine how these materials persist beyond their intended use. Taking up the notion of shifting gear, I suggest that discarded tools and infrastructures do not simply cease to matter - they shift direction, acquiring new meanings and functions as they move between sea and land. In tracing these transformations, the paper contributes to an ocean anthropology attuned to residue, reassembly, and the material politics of coastal change.