Wigen, Allison. “Fishermen as Artists: Cultural Production in Times of Change.”

Artmaking has a long tradition in commercial fishing communities. In the nineteenth century, American whalers adorned their journals and logbooks with poetry and illustrations, while sailors practiced scrimshaw, carving intricate designs into shells, walrus tusks, and whalebone. More recently, since 1998, commercial fishermen from across the Pacific and Atlantic coasts have gathered annually in Astoria, Oregon to share their original poetry, storytelling, and songs. This study examines the material conditions of fishermen’s work and artmaking across these two historical periods: the peak of the American whaling industry (1840–1860) and the contemporary U.S. commercial fishing industry (2000–2025). I find that fishermen’s cultural production offers insights into the material conditions of labor in times of social, economic, political, and environmental upheaval, whether during the Industrial Revolution or today’s climate crisis. These findings suggest that nineteenth-century whalers’ art was an instrumental, enterprising, and colonizing project, whereas twenty-first-century commercial fishermen’s art serves as a form of cultural preservation, celebration, stewardship, and resistance. By comparing these historical moments, this study contributes to sociological and historical understandings of culture-making, labor, and the environment by illustrating how the conditions of work shape artistic expression and how laborers respond to shifting social and environmental pressures through cultural production.

Wigen, Allison. “Fisherpoetry as Community-Based Cultural Resistance.”

This paper examines contemporary commercial fishermen’s cultural production as a form of everyday resistance to social and ecological uncertainty. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews, five weeks of fieldwork in U.S. fishing ports, participant observations at fishermen’s performances and panels, and narrative analysis of fishermen’s artworks, I document how commercial fishing communities translate ecological knowledge and occupational experience into “fisherpoetry”—original stories, songs, and artworks created by commercial fishing communities and shared at the annual Fisherpoets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon. I analyze how fisherpoets use artmaking to narrate, interpret, and reimagine their labor in the face of economic, social, and environmental precarity. I identify four overlapping dimensions of everyday resistance expressed through fisherpoetry: resistance to loss, resistance to erasure, resistance to gender roles, and resistance to climate change. Taken together, I argue that these practices represent a form of community-based cultural resistance: a collective means of resistance by which working people make labor meaningful, through the cultivation of shared spaces and practices.

Wigen, Allison. “Limitations in the Field: On Disability, Reflexivity, and Embodiment in Ethnography.”

Advocates of embodied or carnal ethnography, including Loïc Wacquant and others, argue that researchers must immerse themselves in the physical and social worlds of their participants to the fullest extent possible. This methodological stance privileges procedural or practical knowledge over so-called cerebral or passive knowledge, and assumes that, with enough persistence, any researcher can undertake such immersion despite potential risks. But what happens when the researcher has limitations—physical, cognitive, or emotional—that prevent full participation or immersion? Bridging literature on disability in the academy, reflexivity, and embodiment, I develop a framework of six dimensions that shape how disabled researchers challenge the “imperative” of immersion as they navigate their fields: access, physicality, temporality, disclosure, support, and emotion. Drawing specifically on autoethnographic reflections from my own fieldwork as a researcher with an invisible disability, I show how each dimension forced me to reconsider traditional ethnographic expectations and instead embrace a research approach that accounted for my embodied constraints. Rather than seeing this as a failure of ethnographic rigor, I argue that these limitations generate unique epistemic insights, fostering reflexivity, critical distance, and methodological creativity.

I further critique the binary of “participant-observer” versus “observant-participant,” demonstrating how disabled researchers often occupy a liminal position that preserves analytic distance while remaining relationally engaged. This stance reveals subtleties invisible to both fully immersed and fully detached observers and underscores that immersion alone cannot resolve “insider/outsider” dilemmas. Ultimately, I call for a pluralistic ethnographic practice that treats disability not as a methodological obstacle but as an epistemic resource. Recognizing multiple pathways to knowledge production moves the discipline beyond a universal imperative of embodiment and toward more inclusive, ethically attuned forms of qualitative inquiry.

Wigen, Allison. “The Past, Present, and Uncertain Future of U.S. Craft Occupations.”

The American Arts and Craft movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries arose in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Proponents of this movement feared that industrialization, resulting in a division of labor between production and design, would lead to the demise of traditional handcrafts in the United States. In the mid-twentieth century, manual skill decline accelerated an “overly pessimistic” view of crafts as dying, which persists today. Recently, the emergence of the digital craft marketplace with websites like Etsy.com has given birth to an “overly optimistic” view that crafts are in fact thriving. This study puts these contradictions into relief, showing that neither narrative on its own is sufficient to explain the present state of crafts and craft occupations in the United States, nor predict their future viability. Taken holistically, these narratives provide a more complicated picture and shed light on changing social meanings and value of crafts and craft occupations.