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times - anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss, extinction. The ocean features in the

recent area of inquiry termed the blue humanities (see Gillis, 2013). For example, the work of

Astrida Neimanis travels across environmental humanities and cultural studies, offering a

refreshing turn towards aquatic ecopolitics, exploring embodiment (2013) and representation,

and knowledge production (2015). While the blue humanities offers a hopeful turn to the sea

in environmental humanities, literature nonetheless has a terrestrial focus, moreover there is a

gap in the blue humanities literature of work that engages with fisheries and more broadly

with marine environments as an important source of food.

Cultural studies, my departmental “home” discipline, offers many theoretical tools to

grapple with questions of definition as well as opportunities to analyse the epistemological

and ontological underpinnings of sustainability. Furthermore, the discipline’s attention to the

politics of knowledge production and representation, and systems and relations of power is

important to an understanding of how marine sustainability issues and fishing communities

are framed, the knowledge that comes to matter in resolving environmental conflicts, and the

wider systems of power within which fisheries operate. Yet, regardless of its usefulness scant

cultural studies scholarship engages with marine related topics. Elspeth Probyn's contribution

to cultural studies is an exception. Her string of publications, the most recent being the book

Eating the Oceans (2016) and the article How to Represent a Fish? (forthcoming), clearly

forge a place for fisheries and marine sustainability in cultural studies. While Jodie Frawley's

work on estuaries and fisheries in Australia is situated in the emerging field of environmental

humanities, it also draws from cultural studies and history. Her research considers the popular

cultures of fishing and ideas about conservation (see Frawley et al. 2012; Frawley, 2015).

My own contribution to cultural studies is through an original application of a series

of theoretical and interpretative frames, drawn from cultural studies, to an everyday item - a

can of tuna - and to a fishing practice and system - la tonnara. A politic of knowledge

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