Futuring Salmon: Dreams of Marine Ranching Amidst the Ruins of the Anthropocene

Mayumi Fukunaga will explore historical trajectories of the concept of productivity: capitalist, ecological, and communal, across scales of human engagement in postwar Japan. Particularly, she will talk about how productivity has negotiated, mediated, and collaborated with salmon marine ranching amidst the socio-ecological ruins of littoral postwar Japan. Productivity, one of the powerful conceptual tools used to legitimatize political and economic development projects, has framed governmentality, codes, objectives and technologies in order to engineer coastal ecosystems and their non-human lives, mobilize people to imagine and work on behalf of these neo-futures, and bind human perceptions of multi-species politics and ethics.

Prof. Fukunaga will discuss that the practices among local fishers and stock enhancement technologists have led to a dialectic reorganization of this fishery, a new science-technological imaginary, even as their lived and local experiences struggle with the restoration of social and ecological capabilities so that they might continue being fishers amidst these ruins. Their efforts have led them to re-conceptualize what is productivity, giving voice to their idea of generativity as a new ethical framing of marine ranching and aquaculturing amidst the coasts in the Anthropocene.

Mayumi Fukunaga is Associate Professor of Environmental Sociology and Environmental Ethics in the Graduate Schools of Frontier Sciences in University of Tokyo.