At the 9th Global Conference on Gender in Aquaculture and Fisheries (GAF9), hosted at the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand Dried Fish Matters (DFM) organized a special two-part panel titled Gender Dynamics in Social Economies of Dried Fish in Asia. The panel brought together DFM scholars, collaborators, and graduate researchers working across South and Southeast Asia, and featured nine paper presentations that collectively showcased the project’s gender-focused research on the social economy of dried fish value chains.
Across the two sessions, the panel explored how dried fish economies are shaped by gendered divisions of labour, women’s agency and patriarchal bargaining, artisanal knowledge and skills, occupational health risks, informal and care labour, market access and spatial power, and gaps in policy, governance, and human rights protections. Rather than treating dried fish as a narrow economic commodity, the papers emphasized the deeply social nature of these economies – embedded in households, markets, norms, and unequal power relations.
Empirically, the panel covered research from the Philippines, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India (with case studies from Gujarat, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh), while also offering comparative reflections across South and Southeast Asia. The presentations were delivered by Dr. Derek Johnson, Dr. Kyoko Kusakabe, Dr. Tara Nair, Mr. Mohammad Anas Shoebullah Khan, Mr. Jessie Varquez, Ms. Colleen Cranmer, Ms. Gayathri Lokuge, Ms. Safina Naznin, Ms. Aklima Akter, and Dr. Jeena T. Srinivasan.
From Conference Panel to Edited Volume
The GAF9 panel was intentionally conceived as more than a conference session. It functioned as a strategic launchpad for consolidating DFM’s growing body of work on gender and the social economy of dried fish into a forthcoming edited volume. The richness of comparative insights across papers: spanning artisanal knowledge, health, markets, policy, patriarchy, and human rights made visible a shared analytical foundation across the project.
Building on the momentum, DFM scholars and researchers convened immediately after the conference for a DFM Working Group 1 (WG1): Gender and Social Economy workshop. The workshop focused on consolidating DFM’s work on gendered social economies of dried fish and deliberating on the structure, theoretical foundations, and thematic coherence of a forthcoming edited volume.
Together, the GAF9 special panel and the WG1 workshop reaffirmed DFM’s core commitment:
to center gender and social economy as foundational to understanding dried fish economies in Asia.