Paper short abstract:

Fishers under resource protection laws and institutions were imposed new practices as professionals. We analyze a discursive format (reported speech) fishers use for ‘talking’ with the institutions that govern them – contesting legal impositions through the vocabulary of citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

Several laws and institutions aiming to protect marine resources impose new restrictions and obligations to certain professionals, requiring them to change as a condition to become good or valued "ecological citizens". If, as citizens, the professionals need to comply with the laws, then can also - and often do - contest them. Thus contestation places them in a dilemmatic situation: how to remain in the realm of (good) citizenship while legitimately contesting what makes them citizens (their institutions and laws). This presentation examines how professional artisanal fishers from a Portuguese Natura 2000 protected site deal with this dilemma. Specifically, we examine how they use reported speech - in which the institutions are directly quoted in the discourse of the Self (the interviewee) - for dealing with it. Extracts organized around instances of reported speech were identified in interviews (n=11) and 3 focus groups (n=13). In these extracts, we explore how reported speech is used for giving "out-thereness" and credibility to re-presentations of the institutional-Other, the Self, and their relations; we also examine the explicit and implicit representations of citizenship grounding the arguments interviewees use. We show how interviewees manage to present an authoritarian institution breaching the imperatives of democratic citizenship in their relation with the Self, who is in turn depicted as a good citizen, even if only rarely as a good ecological citizen.