Fish, People, Place.
Dr. Hannah Harrison
I am a human ecologist with interests in human-environment relationships, sustainable seafood and livelihoods, and natural resource and conservation conflicts. I study how people engage with fish and fisheries through their work, cultures, and conservation, and root my work in community-engaged scholarship and place-based case study. I am currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Guelph, and am a Co-I and Science Director for the Coastal Routes Project.
I grew up in the small coastal community of Homer, Alaska, and spent my summers as a kid bumping along in skiffs and fishing boats in the waters of Kachemak Bay and Cook Inlet. Homer is a community of many interests – art, fishing, and especially science. My interest in the world of marine science and fisheries was found in tide pooling expeditions, field trips into salt marshes, and watching whole food webs congregate on a school of fish, all right in my own backyard. Fish, especially salmon, have always been a life blood in my family, and I became a researcher because it seemed too good a deal to pass up thinking and talking about fish with the people that catch them, and call it a career!
Since embarking on that path, I’ve enjoyed a career of talking to fish people in fish places all around the world. I’ve been influenced by seeing how fisheries can lift people from poverty, can facilitate the passage of traditional and cultural knowledge from one generation to the next, can be both an obsession and an escape and, sometimes, sit at the crux of deep-rooted legacies of conflict. Now, I turn my attention toward those complex conflicts, and pursue problem-oriented research questions aimed at addressing natural resource and conservation conflicts, particularly around fisheries. I’ve worked with fisheries stakeholders in Europe, Alaska, and now Ontario to understand the values and attitudes that inform stakeholder perspectives on fisheries management and conservation, and over the last several years have specialized in commercial fisheries and hatchery-based conservation and enhancement research.
I’m a pragmatic thinker, interested in how research can result in tangible tools, frameworks, or improved understandings and implementing those outcomes into real-world scenarios. I see fisheries as complex social-ecological systems, and advocate for change based around ecological and social justice and the improved integration of social science into typically natural science-dominated decision-making processes.