Sheyda Michelle Aboii

SHEYDA M. ABOII, then a graduate student at University of California, San Francisco, California, was awarded a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Subsistence Fishing and a Confluence of Exposures along the Anacostia River,” supervised by Dr. Ian Whitmarsh. Ethnographic research consisted of fishing alongside Black self-identified subsistence fishers and conversational engagements regarding their perspectives on the Anacostia River; fish consumption advisories; exposure risk; and the scope of redevelopment occurring within the greater Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Data were collected and retained in an audiovisual record, as field notes inclusive of partial transcription, and as prose-poetry. Subsistence fishing was observed as an amalgam of catch-and-release fishing pursued for spiritual wellbeing and fishing for consumption. Data suggest that the small-scale, mundane interactions of subsistence fishers with the river invites a reorientation of the senses that makes possible other ways of knowing the river and the river’s inhabitants — opportunities to mother through relation; commune; improvise; account for the (dis)continuities of historical treatment; live with exposure risks; and craft edibility from harmed (and perhaps harming) spaces — to take hold of sustenance in a landscape of unequal plenty. Such subsistence fishing sensibilities unfold in the unassuming register of casting out, reeling in, and casting out again — a circularity of doing that knits past and present; upends easy distinction between public and private spaces; and casually attends to the maintenance of self removed from a racialized dialectic long defining the capital region.