Research

I’m interested in the mutual influences and creative, decolonial possibilities of communication and water. I take an engaged and interdisciplinary approach to knowledge making and shape my research through ongoing practices of listening for questions, critical concerns, information needs, and opportunities for coalition building within communities. I also collaborate with a diverse set of research partners across disciplines and contexts.  My research usually begins with qualitative methods to co-define problems and research questions with partners who will learn from and use the knowledge we create together.

Here are some current projects, all of which are collaborative and involve gradudate student leadership as noted.

Creating a learning network to advance adaptive and anticolonial governance:

The effort to create the Maine Shellfish Learning Network (MSLN) emerged from longstanding engaged research partnerships between the University of Maine, the Mitchell Center, the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) and with shellfish communities, starting and then expanding from Frenchman Bay. The network formally launched in 2019 and the collaboratively-defined mission is to support learning, leadership, and equity across Maine and Wabanaki intertidal fisheries. Getting ready for the launch meeting involved many formative conversations, interviews, and small group meetings to identify how to structure the meeting as well as the objectives for the learning network itself. In one of these conversations, a key partner and longtime clammer advised us that the “MSLN should be a doing network.” We took this to heart and structured the launch meeting around the identification of action-oriented priorities which led to collaborative policy development, the creation of The Mudflat website (themudflat.org), technical support across multiple community-led projects, and participating in other networks.

Here are select papers and technical documents related to this work:

Collaborative policy development for intertidal restoration and climate adaptation

During the Spring 2023 session of the Maine Legislature, we co-led a collaborative policy development process to change how community-based shellfish restoration projects are regulated as aquaculture through the Limited Purpose Aquaculture (LPA) Program. Through Dr. Gabrielle Hillyer’s leadership and in partnership with the Maine Shellfish Co-management Initiative (MSCMI), multiple sectors within DMR including representatives from the Bureau of Public Health, the Nearshore Marine Resources Program, and the Aquaculture Division (which is now part of Public Health) we worked iteratively to develop short and long term recommendations for informal and formal policy changes. We started reaching out to legislators to initiate a bill-development process and in doing so learned about a complementary and community-led effort that was already happening. Dan Devereaux partnered with Senator Mattie Daughtry and invited us to support that effort. This resulted in the formation of LD 581 – “An Act to Assist Municipal Shellfish Conservation Programs” which proposed two important changes to how community-based shellfish restoration projects are regulated, as towns no longer have to pay the yearly fee and they can now have as many volunteers as needed involved in working on the gear itself. Our research had identified these as significant concerns. This legislative act was unanimously approved by the Marine Resource Committee, marking a significant achievement in shellfish conservation and management as the bill received broad support from towns, DMR, and the aquaculture sector. The collaborative process now serves as a model for those seeking to pass related legislation to support intertidal restoration and climate adaptation. We are working on two related papers to document and share what we learned from this process.

Changing conversations about coastal access in Maine and Wabanaki homelands

There are widespread declines in coastal access due to the intersecting forces of gentrificaiton, colonialism, land dispossession, and wealth inequality. This is a pressing concern for many clamming communities in Maine and Wabanaki homelands and one that we have addressed through an in-depth and ongoing partnership intiative. As part of her Master’s thesis research, B Lauer led a series of small group meetings in advance of a broader panel discussion at the 2023 Shellfish Focus Day of the Maine Fishermen’s Forum. That event served as catalyst for a series of ongoing following up conversations and the recent formation of the Coastal Access Strategy Exchange (CASE). This group has become a hub for generating new strategies, exchanging information, and maintaining momentum for protecting, preserving, and expanding access to coastal spaces and shellfish harvesting. This group also has meaningful, in-depth participation from realtors who were identified as a key partner group. The project successfully established partnerships with key organizations, including the Maine Association of Realtors, University of Maine Law School, Northeast Ocean Cluster, Sea Meadow Marine Foundation, and Maine Sea Grant. These collaborations have helped raise awareness of access issues and support access protection, preservation, and expansion efforts across the state. The Shellfish Advisory Council has added access as a permanent item on their agenda, signifying their commitment to understanding and supporting access-related initiatives.

Communicating care in coastal fisheries: Narratives of restoration, adaptation, and collaborative policy change

This project grows out of sustained conversations within the Maine Shellfish Co-management Inititiative (MSCMI) to promote listening and practices of care within Maine and Wabanaki wild clam fisheries and in the context of Maine’s shellfish co-management approach. As part of this effort, we noticed how news media consistently describe the soft-shell clam fisheries as being in a state of crisis and where investing in this fishery, as one news article puts it, is “a lost cause.” While there is ample evidence that small-scale fisheries and the communities these fisheries support are rapidly changing, the crisis narrative conceals more than it reveals about how communities are actively responding and the longer-term histories to which these changes are connected. In this project, we document the dominance of the crisis narrative in news reports about clamming and we connect with critiques in Native American and Indigenous Studies and environmental communication that describe some of the problems with this narrative. These critiques also point to a need to shift from crisis to more relational forms of care. When we make this shift, different stories of conservation and intertidal restoration, the emergence of partnership networks, and the formation of collaborative policy solutions come into view. We listen to and share these stories and we conclude by asking how listening, as a call to action, can shape broader, crisis-focused efforts and encourage practices of care within climate adaptation planning across contexts.

Rhetoric, ethics, and anticolonial approaches to science in transdisciplinary collaborations: A case study of the Maine eDNA Project

We take an engaged approach to studying and shaping communication within a large-scale transdisciplinary project that intends to develop environmental-DNA science to support coastal decision making and anticolonial approaches to science. Our team, which includes Drs. Heather Leslie, Kaitlyn Haynal, Michael Kinnison, Darren Ranco, and graduate students Jennifer Smith-Mayo and Sarah Risley, addresses critical and emergent questions about ethics, power, and communication on this project. For more on this effort, check out our first paper, entitled How Does Strategic Communication Shape Transdisciplinary Collaboration? A Focus on Definitions, Audience, Expertise, and Ethical Praxis. Also see the Maine eDNA Project for related details.