Conservation and care: material politics and Atlantic salmon on Newfoundland’s Gander River

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to an emerging and vibrant body of post-structural scholarship situated within science technology and society (STS) on practices and their role in world making. Our focus is Atlantic salmon conservation in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. We examine the different material and social orders that have over time connected human and salmon bodies. These different socio-material orders do not exist in harmony. On the contrary, they are in tension and reflect different visions/versions of how to conserve and care for Atlantic salmon. Our contribution is to interfere with the dominant narrative of Atlantic salmon conservation by drawing on the concept of care, and by introducing a new salmon that we call the willful salmon.

Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis)

“…Research asks what and/or who is cared for in conservation. For example, Atchison (2019) finds that care is designated for some categories of animals but not others, and Daniels and Mather (2017) apply the concept of care to unsettle dominant narratives supporting conservation practice.…”

“…Caring and killing frequently overlap in conservation (e.g. Atchison, 2019; Daniels and Mather, 2017; Hawkins and Paxton, 2019), and scholars attend to the tensions and politics of killing as part of environmental care. And yet, Atchison (2019: 745) argues, ‘To reconcile care for carp and care for the environment need not be a reductive choice, but it does require us to ask vigilant questions about the motivations and enactment of death, and to not imagine that carp or the effects of killing them are so quickly dissolved.’…”

Making space for plural ontologies in fisheries governance: Ireland’s disobedient offshore islands

“…Nightingale 2013;Bresnihan 2016;McCormack 2016;Sønvisen et al 2017;Bresnihan 2019;McCormack and Forde 2020), it is less usual to see this topic explicitly framed as an ontological challenge (although see St. Martin 2006;Rossiter et al 2015;Daniels and Mather 2017;St. Martin and Olson 2017;Mather et al 2017;Neilson and São Marcos 2019).…”