Department seminars: Professor Paula Uimonen

Can sea cucumber farming improve environmental and social sustainability in Tanzania? Blue Economy through mariculture is often touted as a sustainable use of marine resources, minimizing environmental degradation, while maximizing economic and social benefits. But this new paradigm in marine resource extraction also changes how fishing communities relate to the sea and its various creatures, in fundamental ways.

This presentation focuses on a new initiative of sea cucumber farming in Kaole, a coastal community with a long history of small-scale fishing and transoceanic connections. The introduction of sea cucumber farming constitutes a shift from fishing to farming, a problematic transformation riddled with social tensions, economic uncertainty and environmental precarity. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork among fishers and other members of the Association of Sea Cucumber Farming Kaole, Bagamoyo, this presentation highlights some of the contentious issues involved and how they are responded to in the local community. This study is part of Swahili Ocean Worlds, a collaborative multidisciplinary project between Stockholm University and the University of Dar es Salaam, supported by the Swedish Research Council (2022-2024). See Swahili Ocean Worlds on YouTube and swahilioceanworlds on Instagram.       

Paula Uimonen is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. She is specialized in digital anthropology as well as the anthropology of art, visual culture, world literature, oceans and water. Her recent open access publications include the article “Spiritual Relationality in Swahili Ocean Worlds” (2021, special issue on water in kritisk etnografi), the monograph Invoking Flora Nwapa. Nigerian Women Writers, Femininity and Spirituality in World Literature (2020, Stockholm University Press), and the book chapter “One World Literature with Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa”, in Claiming Space. Locations and Orientations in World Literatures (2021, Bloomsbury Academic). She has also co-edited a volume on visual digital heritage, Connect to Collect: Approaches to Collecting Social Digital Photography in Museums and Archives (2020, Nordiska Museets Förlag).