Through a collaborative project comparing intersectional power relations and resistance in fishing communities, MSU scholars Mark Axelrod, Maria del Mar Mancha-Cisneros, Abigail Bennett, and Meghan Vona have fostered a strong and ongoing relationship with Neyra Solano and other employees at Communidad y Biodiversidad (COBI). COBI is a Mexican non-profit that promotes marine conservation and sustainable fisheries management. With the support of MSU’s Center for Gender in Global Context through Strategic Partnership Grant (SPG) funding, this team was able to bring Neyra Solano to MSU for a 5-day visit, where she attended team meetings, presented via GenCen, and met with scholars across campus. This visit allowed the MSU team an opportunity to progress their paper, discuss next steps for this project, and identify new potential projects and research questions that they hope to pursue in collaboration with COBI.  

Previous Relationship 

Prior to this project, COBI served as a local sponsor for Abigail Bennet’s dissertation fieldwork fellowship, and Mancha-Cisneros was a Consultant and Research Associate with COBI during her doctoral training.  

The researchers initially connected with COBI for the current project after sending out a Listserv to organizations studying gender and fishing across the world. COBI expressed interest in collaborating on the project and broadening their own work in this area. This led to a more involved collaboration between the MSU team and COBI.  

How the Relationship Has Developed 

Through the SPG funded trip, MSU scholars and COBI representative Neyra Solano succeeded in advancing each other’s knowledge and strengthening the project. The collaborators found that working with people with different academic and geographical backgrounds led to building on each other’s expertise and coming up with new potential projects and research questions.  

“I'm really excited about some of the synergies that led to new questions...I don't think any of us had really thought about some of these research questions before, but building on each other's experiences in one realm led us to think about some other realms,” Axelrod said. Potential projects and research questions that both MSU scholars and COBI personnel hope to explore rely on the continuation of this collaboration.  

Accomplishments and Future Directions 

The MSU team produced a draft of their collaborative paper and presented their work at the International Studies Association conference in March of 2025. They plan to edit this paper and submit it to a journal for publication this year. The team also put together a global survey of experts in the field. They are now analyzing survey responses to get a broader picture of current research being done on fishing communities.  

Recently, an article on gender-inclusive data systems in small-scale fisheries has been published. This article preceded the SPG-funded 

The team is also excited about the prospect of working with COBI in the future. “I’m excited to publish a paper, but we also have...much bigger ideas of understanding how intersectionality plays out in fishing communities,” Dr. Axelrod noted. This project, supported by SPG funding through GenCen, allowed the MSU team to develop a strong partnership with COBI, which will likely lead to more research and involved projects in their area of interest.