Artistic Labor Praxis: Fisherpoetry in the Age of Climate Change

Allison Wigen, Truman State University

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews conducted with fisherpoets—commercial fishermen who make art about their work and lives—and close readings of fishermen’s artworks, this chapter argues that fisherpoetry constitutes a form of “artistic labor praxis”: a set of reflective and creative practices through which working people make meaning from their labor and transform that meaning into social and environmental action. As frontline witnesses to disappearing species, warming waters, and increasingly volatile weather, commercial fishermen use poetry and storytelling to articulate forms of ecological knowledge and lived experience that are often excluded from policy and scientific discourse. Through fisherpoetry, fishermen narrate environmental loss, challenge reductive portrayals of fishermen as extractive or indifferent, and at times, engage in more overt environmental action. Unlike frameworks that frame praxis as primarily oppositional, I argue that fisherpoetry is better understood as a generative and relational praxis. Through the Fisherpoets Gathering and other collective practices like advocacy, education, stewardship, and narrative reclamation, artistic labor praxis becomes a mode of resistant-resilience in the face of climate change. The chapter draws on Marxian, Gramscian, and Freireian conceptions of praxis as reflection and action for transformation. Ultimately, I argue that fisherpoets emerge as a group of organic intellectuals engaged in counter-hegemonic struggle, and that fisherpoetry comprises a form of artistic labor praxis that both reflects work and does work.

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 Presented in Session 154. Aesthetics, Materiality, and Ideology