Floating Factories: Corporate Power, Communities, and Aquatic Food Systems

This workshop will examine the expansion of industrial sea bass and sea bream farming and its impact on local communities, ecologies and global food systems, particularly in Turkey and in West African countries like Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania. We will critically discuss aquaculture as a new commodity frontier, extracting fish from the shores of the Global South for incorporation into the fishmeal and fish oil industries, to highlight the contested livelihoods and ecological damage. Exploring production processes that evade traceability and accountability, the workshop will highlight the importance of alternative ecological frameworks such as Blue Justice to foreground the importance of local ecologies, diets, and labour conditions. Speaker Bios Pınar Ertör Akyazı is an associate professor at the Institute of Environmental Sciences, Boğaziçi University. She is an ecological economist working on fisheries, food sovereignty, biodiversity and political ecology of nature conservation. She worked as a research fellow for UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook (GEO-5) and EU-funded projects EJOLT (Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade) and ENTITLE (European Network of Political Ecology). She was a Mercator-IPC Fellow and post-doc researcher at the Istanbul Policy Center, Sabanci University. Her current work focuses on food systems and agroecology within the Horizon Europe FutureFoodS Project “Reshaping food systems: value change transformation through reconnection” (RESHAPE). She teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses such as Ecological Economics, Environmental Economics, Social Ecology and Research Methods. She is a member of the Co-Living Design Lab at the Istanbul Technical University. Irmak Ertör is a political ecologist and an associate professor working at the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Bogazici University, Istanbul, since 2019. Before her current position, she worked at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) as a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded ENVJUSTICE project, focusing on global fisheries conflicts and environmental justice. She holds a BS in Economics and an MA in Modern Turkish History from Bogazici University, Turkey. She has been a Marie Curie (ITN) early-stage researcher of the ENTITLE project (European Network of Political Ecology) and completed her PhD on the "Political Ecology of Marine Finfish Aquaculture in Europe" at ICTA, UAB. Currently, she teaches political ecology, alternative economies, and gender history, as well as continues to do research on socio-environmental conflicts and social movements of fisher communities, community-supported fisheries, food systems and food sovereignty, blue economy/degrowth, and environmental/blue justice. She has research published in journals like the Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Marine Policy, and Global Environmental Change, among others, and she is an associate editor of the journal New Perspectives on Turkey. Davide Mancini is a freelance environmental journalist. He has coordinated several cross-border investigations into issues including illegal fishing in the Mediterranean and West Africa, deforestation and wildfires, and plastic pollution. More recently, he has focused on food supply chains, exposing the environmental damage outsourced behind European food consumption, particularly in the fishery sector. He has been an Ocean Reporting Network fellow at the Pulitzer Centre in 2024/2025. His work has been featured in international media outlets in English, Italian, and Spanish. Before focusing on environmental journalism, he worked in Brussels for human rights NGOs, advocating within EU institutions. Mancini holds a master’s degree in journalism, with a specialisation in war and conflict reporting, from Aarhus University (Denmark) and Swansea University (UK).