I am a marine and economic anthropologist and have developed three main strands of research:
1) A comparative analysis of fisheries governance, focussing on the social and cultural implications of market-based environmental instruments, particularly Individual Transferable Quota fisheries. This includes a longitudinal approach, exploring the impact of ocean privatisations on small-scale and Indigenous fishers, the expansion of state property in marine protected areas, the financialisation of catch rights, contestations over sustainability and attendant social struggles.
2) Ethnographically investigating indigeneity in the context of Indigenous claims and settlements. I combine an ethnographic approach with a political-economic analysis to explore the socio-cultural transformations that arise in claims-making forums and post-settlement environments. I trace the enormous impact, inclusions and exclusions, of the 1992 Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act, and, more recently, the Marine and Coastal Area Act (2011). This includes research with local hapū on Indigenous kincentric ecologies, customary marine tenures and the dynamism of kin group organisation.
3) Theorising marine socio-ecological transformations in terms of borders and boundaries. This project examines cross-cultural understandings of sustainability, extraction, human-non-human relations, pollution and species decline thorough a variety of case studies located in saltwater environments.