For a long time, ecological concerns about fisheries have focused on a systems approach to exploitation through the prism of resources. In my view, the productive work approach is essential if we are to think about concrete relationships with the world and, eventually, their transformations. It allows us to draw not only on an analysis of the top-down production of ecologization thinking and public policies, but also on an understanding of the concrete, material and ideal proofs that workers have of their environment – understood in the broadest sense, i.e. at once technical, regulatory, relational and natural. In concluding my thesis in anthropology, defended at the end of 2024, which reports on an ethnography of the seafaring profession on the tropical tuna seiners of the French fleet, I take into account the need to understand the environment in its double sense, i.e. in the sense of social environment (via work) and natural environment (maritime ecologies).

For a long time, ecological concerns about fisheries have focused on a systems approach to exploitation through the prism of resources. In my view, the productive work approach is essential if we are to think about concrete relationships with the world and, eventually, their transformations. It allows us to draw not only on an analysis of the top-down production of ecologization thinking and public policies, but also on an understanding of the concrete, material and ideal proofs that workers have of their environment – understood in the broadest sense, i.e. at once technical, regulatory, relational and natural. In concluding my thesis in anthropology, defended at the end of 2024, which reports on an ethnography of the seafaring profession on the tropical tuna seiners of the French fleet, I take into account the need to understand the environment in its double sense, i.e. in the sense of social environment (via work) and natural environment (maritime ecologies).

I’m interested in the ordeals experienced and imbued by relations between social worlds within the framework of ecological normativity. Investigating these ordeals raises a number of questions: to what extent do social relations and race relations (understood as a social construct) captured by the ethnography of work enable us to apprehend different relations to resources and ecology, as well as to the ecologization of thought and the ecologization of practices? These questions are all the more pressing as the power relationships between all the players in the fishing industry are extremely present – on the docks of fishing ports as well as on the boats. Behind these power dynamics, the issue seems to be that of defining what makes a “good” fishery or a “good fisherman”. For me, ODIPE is an opportunity to document the discourses and actions which, in the manufacture of diplomatic activities geared towards protecting and exploiting the oceans, create the figure of the fisherman. This will enable me to study in greater depth the intersecting processes of the ecologization of professional practices and the disqualification or requalification of fisheries professions.