Short abstract

This paper explores emotions in small-scale fisheries under climate change, conceiving climate perception as an embodied practice and (dis)concern(s) as fishers’ affective configurations. Challenges for climate communication and science–fishing collaboration from a STS-grounded perspective are given

Long abstract

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 75 interviews with the small-scale fishers of the Balearic Islands at the intersection of anthropology and fisheries science, this paper explores affects and emotional responses in fishing practices amid climate change. Inspired by material‑semiotics (Law, 2019) and the affective turn (Clough & Halley, 2007), we propose to understand climate perception not as an individual, primarily cognitive and visual process, but as a collective and embodied practice (Bourdieu, 1991; Selgas, 1999), in which the environment is neither external nor passive (Ingold, 2000). From this position, affects and emotions do not arise from the magnitude of environmental change itself, but from fishers’ relations with the environment in their everyday practices and in combination with governance constraints : Temperatures, species dynamics, regulations, and forms of trust in the sea, compose an ambivalent mechanics of (dis)concern(s), following a notion of distributed agency (Latour, 2005) and situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988). Finally, we examine the relationship between representations of climate change and the experience at the Mediterranean Sea, showing how occasional mismatches between them generate critical barriers for climate communication, where emotions (Sasser, 2024), such as trust (Hardwig, 1991), shape possibilities for collaboration between science and fishing communities. This approach articulates alliances as a matter of concern (Latour, 2004) to collectively navigate the effects posed by climate change from which to envision planetary futures at the crossroads of science and society (Miller, 2001).

Keywords: climate perception, small‑scale fishers, emotions, science and society, affects.