Every day, millions of people eat seafood without asking who caught it, or what working conditions made it possible to reach our plates. Based on more than four years of multi-sited ethnographic research in Taiwan, Indonesia, and Singapore, Dr. Beatrice Zani explores the lives of Southeast Asian migrant fishers employed aboard distant-water fishing vessels. Combining participant observation with more than 140 interviews with migrant workers, vessel owners, labor brokers, port authorities, NGOs, and trade unionists, Dr. Zani examines how labor takes shape across constantly shifting maritime environments in which legal authority and accountability are fragmented and posits that the distant-water fishing industry is sustained by an oceanic labor regime, where the sea itself shapes work, mobility, and everyday life. Bringing the ocean to the center of the analysis offers a different perspective on globalization: one in which labor, commodities, and power move together across maritime space, making visible the inequalities concealed behind the seafood we consume.
Beatrice Zani is a sociologist and an ethnographer, associate research professor at French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is currently a visiting scholar at the Institute of Sociology of Academia Sinica (Taiwan). She received her PhD from Lyon University (2019). Drawing on the case study of transnational labor in the Asian fishing and shipping sectors (China, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia), her ongoing research explores the link between labor and commodity mobilities, global work and supply chains, informality and digitality in the transformation of capitalism and globalization. She is the PI of the French National Research Agency (ANR)-funded project FORSEA: Migrations and Forced Labor in the Maritime Economies of Globalized Asia (2026-2029). She is also, with Po-yi Hung (National Taiwan University) the France-based PI of the Franco-Taiwanese ORCHID Project ' Global Mobilities in the Digital Age'.
Dr. Zani has a strong track record of publications for the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies; Journal of Immigrant and Refugees Studies; Asia Pacific Viewpoint; Globalizations; International Migration; Emotion, Space and Society; Journal of Chinese Overseas, etc. She is the author of Women Migrants in Southern China and in Taiwan: Mobilities, Digital Economies and Emotions (Routledge, 2022). She is also the author of a sociological comic book Women Migrants, Bras, and Chicken Feet: The Journey of Made in China (University of Montreal Press, 2026).
This public lecture is presented by UCLA Asia Pacific Center as part of the UCLA Taiwan in the World Lecture Series.