This paper is about working with fishers who dare to fight for a way of life which maintains lived relations with fish and resisting ocean grabbing and privatisation. As researchers and artists, we have been working with artisanal fishing communities overcoming the potential boundaries of languages, cultures and daily life. We disrupt common hierarchies of power in the often small details of interaction. We have learned that we have similar ways of being as our fisher colleagues, who make their own decisions as to when to go to sea, being “free” instead of having free time from work (Højrup, 2003). With the strong images of industrial fishing that dominate; the individual fisher is mostly invisible in the media. But more than 90% of the total fishing people in the world fish at a small-scale, in rich, technologically developed places of Europe and North America as well as in other “poorer” places (Rocklin 2016). It is quite amazing how robust the European fishing communities are in the midst of all the economic and social upheavals. Even with the privatization of fishing rights, the globalisation of the trading in fish and the regulation of fishing, there are still 90,000 full and part-time jobs in small scale fishing in the EU (Symes, Phillipson & Salmi, 2015). Fishing communities point out that formal education imposes a wicked choice on their children to learn from schools and leave the fishing communities or escape with their identities and ways to relate to nature intact, but without diplomas vital for obtaining licences to master their own boats and secure a future (Neilson & São Marcos, 2016). Although local communities still function as a reservoir for traditional knowledges, sustainable modes of production and forms of mutual aid, these have been severely marginalized and eroded throughout centuries of liberal policies. Thus, intergenerational education is critical for keeping these communities alive and open to evolution, but also to grant them a role in the environmental education of the young people in communitarian ways of life (González-Gaudiano, 2016). Thus, as the training of young fishers requires formal education, so formal education could benefit from learning how can we act collectively to face the adversities that fall upon us all (Gruenewald, 2003).

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