Job description

Sofie is a PhD fellow at the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea, Aurora Centre, Faculty of Law. 

Her doctoral project "Encountering Blue Transformation: a legal ethnography of salmon farming and resistance in Norway and Chile" explores and problematises the relationship between law and power in the roll out of the blue transformation focusing on one of the world’s most valuable aquaculture industries: salmon farming. 

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), aquaculture now provides more aquatic food for human consumption than fisheries and is the world’s most rapidly growing food production industry. Alongside States and multinational corporations, international organisations themselves are playing a significant role in pushing “sustainable aquaculture intensification” to meet a growing global demand for aquatic foods. In this context, farmed salmon has emerged as a significant contributor to the expansion of global trade in aquatic products in recent decades.

The aim of this thesis is two-fold: First, it seeks to problematise the narrative of salmon farming as a catalyst for a blue transformation rooted in sustainable development by analysing how (international and national) legal frameworks that facilitates or constrain salmon farming re-arrange local coastal relationships. The aim of this exercise is to document the relationship between the legal technicalities of blue transformation and local forms of dispossession and environmental injustice. Second, turning to the communities living along the coasts where salmon farming expands, the thesis explores how coastal Indigenous Peoples and small-scale fishers/ seafood harvesters in southern Chile and northern Norway mobilize law to resist or refuse salmon farming.

Through critical legal ethnography, the thesis aims to visibilize normative conflicts within the blue transformation programme, unearth global lines of resonsibility of coastal environmental in/justice, and explore how local resistance and refusal of salmon farming may point in the direction of a more just coastal governance.