Short Abstract

This panel explores how African coastal communities perceive, use and respond to changing marine environments. It brings together perspectives on small-scale fisheries, embodied knowledge, resource use and community resilience across different historical and geographical contexts.

Long Abstract

Small-scale fisheries are pivotal to livelihoods, local economies and food security across the world, yet their contribution remains difficult to assess due to the lack of a consensual definition and systematic data (FAO, Duke University, & WorldFish, 2023; Smith & Basurto, 2019). Often characterised by low-capital, multi-gear and multispecies practices, small-scale fisheries are distinguished from industrial fisheries not only by their technologies, but also by their social and cultural dimensions (FAO, 2022).

In Africa, scholarship has increasingly examined coastal environments and resource use, but the everyday relationships between fishing communities, marine resources and changing environments remain comparatively underexplored (Neumann et al., 2015; Sowman & Cardoso, 2010; Lowitt, 2014; March & Failler, 2022). This panel places coastal communities at the centre of analysis and asks how they perceive, learn from, use and respond to the marine environments on which their livelihoods depend.

Drawing on approaches that understand knowledge as embodied and acquired through practice, we are particularly interested in how fishing skills emerge through sensory engagement with the marine world—through seeing, listening, smelling, touching, tasting and bodily movement (Ingold, 2000; Marchand, 2012; Gowlland, 2019; Stoller, 1989). Such practices offer a way to examine how communities interpret environmental change, negotiate access to resources and develop forms of resilience.

The panel welcomes historically grounded and interdisciplinary contributions examining changing relationships between coastal communities, marine resources and environments across different African contexts and periods.

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