scholarly journals Marine Social Science for the Peopled Seas

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Bennett

Coastal communities, indigenous peoples, and small-scale fishers rely on the ocean for livelihoods, for subsistence, for wellbeing and for cultural continuity. Thus, understanding the human dimensions of the world’s peopled seas and coasts is fundamental to evidence-based decision-making across marine policy realms, including marine conservation, marine spatial planning, fisheries management, the blue economy and climate adaptation. This perspective article contends that the marine social sciences must inform the pursuit of sustainable oceans. To this end, the article introduces this burgeoning field and briefly reviews the insights that social science can offer to guide ocean and coastal policy and management. The upcoming United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) provides a tremendous opportunity to build on the current interest, need for and momentum in the marine social sciences. We will be missing the boat if the marine social sciences do not form an integral and substantial part of the mandate and investments of this global ocean science for sustainability initiative.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Bennett

The ocean is the next frontier for many conservation and development activities. Growth in marine protected areas, fisheries management, the blue economy, and marine spatial planning initiatives are occurring both within and beyond national jurisdictions. This mounting activity has coincided with increasing concerns about sustainability and international attention to ocean governance. Yet, despite growing concerns about exclusionary decision-making processes and social injustices, there remains inadequate attention to issues of social justice and inclusion in ocean science, management, governance and funding. In a rapidly changing and progressively busier ocean, we need to learn from past mistakes and identify ways to navigate a just and inclusive path towards sustainability. Proactive attention to inclusive decision-making and social justice is needed across key ocean policy realms including marine conservation, fisheries management, marine spatial planning, the blue economy, climate adaptation and global ocean governance for both ethical and instrumental reasons. This discussion paper aims to stimulate greater engagement with these critical topics. It is a call to action for ocean-focused researchers, policy-makers, managers, practitioners, and funders.


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 71 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. A. Alexander ◽  
A. J. Hobday ◽  
C. Cvitanovic ◽  
E. Ogier ◽  
K. L. Nash ◽  
...  

Climate change, in combination with population growth, is placing increasing pressure on the world’s oceans and their resources. This is threatening sustainability and societal wellbeing. Responding to these complex and synergistic challenges requires holistic management arrangements. To this end, ecosystem-based management (EBM) promises much by recognising the need to manage the ecosystem in its entirety, including the human dimensions. However, operationalisation of EBM in the marine environment has been slow. One reason may be a lack of the inter-disciplinary science required to address complex social–ecological marine systems. In the present paper, we synthesise the collective experience of the authors to explore progress in integrating natural and social sciences in marine EBM research, illustrating actual and potential contributions. We identify informal barriers to and incentives for this type of research. We find that the integration of natural and social science has progressed at most stages of the marine EBM cycle; however, practitioners do not yet have the capacity to address all of the problems that have led to the call for inter-disciplinary research. In addition, we assess how we can support the next generation of researchers to undertake the effective inter-disciplinary research required to assist with operationalising marine EBM, particularly in a changing climate.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid van Putten ◽  
Rachel Kelly ◽  
Rachel D. Cavanagh ◽  
Eugene J. Murphy ◽  
Annette Breckwoldt ◽  
...  

Successful management and mitigation of marine challenges depends on cooperation and knowledge sharing which often occurs across culturally diverse geographic regions. Global ocean science collaboration is therefore essential for developing global solutions. Building effective global research networks that can enable collaboration also need to ensure inter- and transdisciplinary research approaches to tackle complex marine socio-ecological challenges. To understand the contribution of interdisciplinary global research networks to solving these complex challenges, we use the Integrated Marine Biosphere Research (IMBeR) project as a case study. We investigated the diversity and characteristics of 1,827 scientists from 11 global regions who were attendees at different IMBeR global science engagement opportunities since 2009. We also determined the role of social science engagement in natural science based regional programmes (using key informants) and identified the potential for enhanced collaboration in the future. Event attendees were predominantly from western Europe, North America, and East Asia. But overall, in the global network, there was growing participation by females, students and early career researchers, and social scientists, thus assisting in moving toward interdisciplinarity in IMBeR research. The mainly natural science oriented regional programmes showed mixed success in engaging and collaborating with social scientists. This was mostly attributed to the largely natural science (i.e., biological, physical) goals and agendas of the programmes, and the lack of institutional support and push to initiate connections with social science. Recognising that social science research may not be relevant to all the aims and activities of all regional programmes, all researchers however, recognised the (potential) benefits of interdisciplinarity, which included broadening scientists’ understanding and perspectives, developing connections and interlinkages, and making science more useful. Pathways to achieve progress in regional programmes fell into four groups: specific funding, events to come together, within-programme-reflections, and social science champions. Future research programmes should have a strategic plan to be truly interdisciplinary, engaging natural and social sciences, as well as aiding early career professionals to actively engage in such programmes.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hollie Booth ◽  
Muhammad Ichsan ◽  
Rizky Fajar Hermansyah ◽  
Lailia Nur Rohmah ◽  
Kusuma Banda Naira ◽  
...  

Fisheries bycatch is the greatest threat to migratory, long-lived marine animals. Managing bycatch can be particularly problematic in small-scale mixed-species fisheries, where perceptions of target and non-target vary widely, and all catches have economic or subsistence value. Such fisheries are ubiquitous throughout the world’s oceans, and represent a cross-disciplinary challenge for biodiversity, food security and livelihoods. We offer a novel approach for addressing this challenge, drawing on well-established theories from behavioural and social sciences. We first typify bycatch as a spectrum rather than a clearly delineated component of catch, where the position of a species on this spectrum depends on fishers’ beliefs regarding the outcomes of bycatch-relevant behaviour. We then outline an approach to diagnose the underlying socio-psychological drivers of bycatch, based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour. Finally, we illustrate the approach using an empirical case study, exploring fishers’ beliefs regarding bycatch-relevant behaviour for three endangered species in a small-scale gill net fishery in Indonesia. We show how a socio-psychological approach can help to identify conflicts and synergies between bycatch mitigation and fishers’ beliefs, thus informing more effective and socially-just interventions for marine megafauna conservation. We emphasize the need to understand human dimensions of bycatch, especially in SSFs, where technical fixes alone will be insufficient to change behaviour. Rather, interdisciplinary approaches are needed to align fishers’ needs with conservation objectives. Our spectrum and approach could be widely applied for disentangling drivers of bycatch in other SSFs, and designing interventions which support effective and equitable marine conservation.


2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Highmore

From a remarkably innovative point of departure, Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) suggests that modernist literature and art were not the only cultural practices concerned with reclaiming the everyday and imbuing it with significance. At the same time, Roger Caillois was studying the spontaneous interactions involved in games such as hopscotch, while other small scale institutions such as the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London attempted to reconcile systematic study and knowledge with the non-systematic exchanges in games and play. Highmore suggests that such experiments comprise a less-often recognised ‘modernist heritage’, and argues powerfully for their importance within early-twentieth century anthropology and the newly-emerged field of cultural studies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
Sari Hanafi

This study investigates the preachers and their Friday sermons in Lebanon, raising the following questions: What are the profiles of preachers in Lebanon and their academic qualifications? What are the topics evoked in their sermons? In instances where they diagnosis and analyze the political and the social, what kind of arguments are used to persuade their audiences? What kind of contact do they have with the social sciences? It draws on forty-two semi-structured interviews with preachers and content analysis of 210 preachers’ Friday sermons, all conducted between 2012 and 2015 among Sunni and Shia mosques. Drawing from Max Weber’s typology, the analysis of Friday sermons shows that most of the preachers represent both the saint and the traditional, but rarely the scholar. While they are dealing extensively with political and social phenomena, rarely do they have knowledge of social science


2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 15-20
Author(s):  
Robert Segal

The social sciences do threaten theology/religious studies even when they do not challenge either the reality of God or the reality of belief in the reality of God. The entries in RPP ignore this threat in the name of some wished-for harmony. The entries neither recognize nor refute the challenge of social science to theology/religious studies. They do, then, stand antithetically both to those whom I call "religionists" and to many theologians, for whom there is nothing but a challenge.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Yunis

Pasambahan a Minangkabau society how to speak, the speech full of philosophy which delivery indirectly. This turned out to be complicated understood by some people who did not understand the pasambahan. In the present study, the authors sought to express the values of the philosophy contained in pasambahan as how to speak the traditional Minang community. As time goes, these traditions are disappearing from everyday society, for it needs a way to preserve it back. Pariaman is one area that has always practiced this tradition. In this study, the authors attempted to peel pasambahan text in a manner which according to the author deconstruction approach is one approach that is very controversial in the social sciences today. The process of data analysis by using some theories of social science (eclectic). Among the pragmatic theory and semiotics. The method used in the form of qualitative observation, the authors go directly spaciousness and interact with competent informants. From the discussion, the authors found ten diplomatic elementscontained in tradition and pasamabahan text. These elements in them, '' opener, apology, positioning/element of certainty, stringsattached, request (permission), receipt, delivery destination, contracts/agreements/agreements, offers, and resolver ''.


1988 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Abul Fadl

The need for a relevant and instrumental body of knowledge that can secure the taskof historical reconstruction in Muslim societies originally inspired the da’wa for the Islamizationof knowledge. The immediate targets for this da’wa were the social sciences for obvious reasons.Their field directly impinges on the organization of human societies and as such carries intothe area of human value and belief systems. The fact that such a body of knowledge alreadyexisted and that the norms for its disciplined pursuit were assumed in the dominant practiceconfronted Muslim scholars with the context for addressing the issues at stake. How relevantwas current social science to Muslim needs and aspirations? Could it, in its present formand emphasis, provide Muslims with the framework for operationalizing their values in theirhistorical present? How instrumental is it in shaping the social foundations vital for the Muslimfuture? Is instrumentality the only criteria for such evaluations? In seeking to answer thesequestions the seeds are sown for a new orientation in the social sciences. This orientationrepresents the legitimate claims and aspirations of a long silent/silenced world culture.In locating the activities of Muslim social scientists today it is important to distinguishbetween two currents. The first is in its formative stages as it sets out to rediscover the worldfrom the perspective of a recovered sense of identity and in terms of its renewed culturalaffinities. Its preoccupations are those of the Muslim revival. The other current is constitutedof the remnants of an earlier generation of modernizers who still retain a faith in the universalityof Western values. Demoralized by the revival, as much as by their own cultural alientation,they seek to deploy their reserves of scholarship and logistics to recover lost ground. Bymodifying their strategy and revalorizing the legacy they hope that, as culture-brokers, theymight be more effective where others have failed. They seek to pre-empt the cultural revivalby appropriating its symbols and reinterpreting the Islamic legacy to make it more tractableto modernity. They blame Orientalism for its inherent fixations and strive to redress its selfimposedlimitations. Their efforts may frequently intersect with those of the Islamizing current,but should clearly not be confused with them. For all the tireless ingenuity, these effortsare more conspicuous for their industry than for their originality. Between the new breadof renovationists and the old guard of ‘modernizers’, the future of an Islamic Social Scienceclearly lies with the efforts of the former.Within the Islamizing current it is possible to distinguish three principal trends. The firstopts for a radical perspective and takes its stand on epistemological grounds. It questionsthe compatibility of the current social sciences on account of their rootedness in the paradigmof the European Enlightenment and its attendant naturalistic and positivist biases. Consistencedemands a concerted e€fort to generate alternative paradigms for a new social science fromIslamic epistemologies. In contrast, the second trend opts for a more pragmatic approachwhich assumes that it is possible to interact within the existing framework of the disciplinesafter adapting them to Islamic values. The problem with modern sciene is ethical, notepistemological, and by recasting it accordingly, it is possible to benefit from its strengthsand curtail its derogatory consequences. The third trend focuses on the Muslim scholar, rather ...


Author(s):  
Patrick Köllner ◽  
Rudra Sil ◽  
Ariel I. Ahram

Two convictions lie at the heart of this volume. First, area studies scholarship remains indispensable for the social sciences, both as a means to expand our fount of observations and as a source of theoretical ideas. Second, this scholarship risks becoming marginalized without more efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance and utility. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) is one such effort, seeking to balance attention to regional and local contextual attributes with use of the comparative method in search of portable causal links and mechanisms. CAS engages scholarly discourse in relevant area studies communities while employing concepts intelligible to social science disciplines. In practice, CAS encourages a distinctive style of small-N analysis, cross-regional contextualized comparison. As the contributions to this volume show, this approach does not subsume or replace area studies scholarship but creates new pathways to “middle range” theoretical arguments of interest to both area studies and the social sciences.


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