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 1997, 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 advocacy. 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. More broadly, I propose a theory of division of labor, which argues that work and art are both co-constitutive and dialectically opposed, continuously shaping and challenging each other.

Wigen, Allison. “Fisherpoets: Confronting Climate Change through Art and Work.”

There is some historical precedent to the idea that certain artistic practices are associated with particular occupations. In their article “Political Shoemakers,” historians Eric Hobsbawm and Joan Wallach Scott consider the extent to which nineteenth-century European shoemakers were a product of their trade. Their findings suggest that shoemakers, in contrast to workers in trades like blacksmithing or tailoring, were at the time considered to be “worker-poets,” “worker-intellectuals,” and “popular philosophers,” in addition to their reputation as political radicals. This raises a question: When and why do some workers participate in artistic practices, and to what ends?

Every February, the Fisherpoets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, brings together commercial fishermen from across the Pacific and Atlantic coasts to share poetry, storytelling, and songs. They write of the dangers of the fishing industry, loss at sea, the natural world, and strenuous labor. For some, the fishing trade is uniquely conducive to producing poetry. As historian Hobe Kytr has reflected, “the fisherman’s life is given to long periods alone in which to contemplate his work, his life and the cosmos, so why should it come as any surprise that fishermen are deep?”

Since its inception in 1997, the cultural significance of the annual Fisherpoet Gathering and fishermen’s cultural production have evolved amid escalating environmental change. With the global population growing, aquatic food systems are under economic, political, and environmental pressure. Fishermen face declining fish stocks in some fisheries, rising fuel costs, coastal gentrification, changing regulations, oil spills, and extreme weather brought about by climate change. New commercial and recreational fishing technologies raise governance issues, and concerns over illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing.

As a result of these concerns and challenges, commercial fishing is both blamed for and affected by climate change. This duality leads to commercial fishermen being portrayed as blights on the environment, when in fact many fishermen perceive themselves as front-line advocates for the ecosystems that comprise their livelihoods. Indeed, researchers have documented the resilience, adaptation, and strategic collaborations brought by fishing communities. This project explores how fishermen’s cultural production contributes to this process. I examine how, when, and why commercial fishermen employ artmaking and storytelling to make sense of environmental change and create pressure for sustainable fisheries. Utilizing ethnographic and narrative methods, I ask: (1) How does the fishing occupation shape cultural production? (2) When, how, and why do commercial fishermen engage in artistic practices, and to what ends? (3) How have fishermen’s artistic practices shifted over time? and (4) How do commercial fishermen perceive their role in climate resistance?

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? This article critiques the methodological imperative of embodied ethnography through the lens of disability. Drawing from my experience as a researcher with a hidden disability, I reflect on the ethical and methodological dilemmas of embodied research. During my fieldwork with commercial fishermen, I was invited to join participants at sea—a valuable opportunity for immersive ethnography, but one that posed serious risks to my health and wellbeing. Declining these invitations 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 insights, fostering reflexivity, critical distance, and methodological creativity. This work also critiques the binary between “participant-observer” and “observant-participant,” demonstrating how the disabled researcher occupies a liminal space between these categories, neither claiming nor collapsing epistemic distance and insider/outsider status. Ultimately, this article calls for methodological inclusivity that moves beyond the assumption that immersion is the gold standard of qualitative research. Rather than striving for a universal imperative of embodiment in fieldwork, ethnography must embrace a plurality of approaches that acknowledge the diverse ways that researchers engage with their fields.

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.