Contribution short abstract

This PhD project investigates how modelling practices legitimise industrial salmon farming in Lutruwita/Tasmania by tracing discourses and logics that objectify oceans, dismiss counter-movements, and reproduce inequalities in decision-making.

Contribution long abstract

This PhD research project investigates how power relations are embedded in modelling practices that shape decision support tools (DSTs) used for an expanding industrial salmon industry in Lutruwita/Tasmania. The very concept of 'decision support tool', deployed predominantly by the professional-managerial class, reflects an instrumentalist logic that reduces complex webs of life to manageable objects. Models with such world-making power then legitimise the exploitation of non-human life - salmon and the ocean alike - as resources for profit-making opportunities.

Through a case study of multiple ocean models created in southeast Lutruwita/Tasmania between the years 2000-2024, I aim to challenge the dominant belief that modelling practices are apolitical. The study combines critical discourse analysis and qualitative content analysis of documents with semi-structured interviews involving modellers and government officials.

Now entering my third year, I trace an assemblage of salmon, scientific organisations, colonial administrations, discourses, and modelling practices shaped by an ongoing struggle over histories, values, authority, and identity. I discuss how neoliberal discourse and managerial logics, intertwined with these models, reduce a complex ocean into manageable objects, and how counter-movements are framed as obstructive and dismissed.

By showing how modelling practices reproduce epistemic violence and inequalities in decision-making, this research contributes to political ecology by exposing the ideological work of technocratic tools. Ultimately, it opens up conversations in Lutruwita/Tasmania on how knowledge practices can be disentangled and re-entangled with values that nurture justice and care.