Sharon Fuller

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“Shifting Tides, Shifting Power: Gullah Geechee Managing South Carolina Fisheries”

Introduction by Professor Carolyn Finney

Conventional resource management often creates barriers between state agencies and communities. In an effort to substantively engage diverse stakeholders in decision-making, state agencies are now acknowledging the importance of indigenous self-governance and self-regulation of Common Pool Resources (CPR). In this presentation I discuss the power dynamics of structures of authority producing subsistence fisheries managed as common pool resources in South Carolina’s Sea Islands. In doing so, I will present a gendered analysis of power along a vertical axis of the state governance, local fisheries, and individual households, under a rubric of governmentality, in which people within each component are produced in relation to local politics and externalities. Within this framework I will illustrate shifting alignments of power that enable access to water resources and the continuance of traditional practices critical to Gullah Geechee indigenous articulation in the Americas.

I would like to thank my phenomenal dissertation committee, Carolyn Finney, Chair, Kimberly TallBear, Jeff Romm and Isha Ray for their unwavering commitment to my success.