Running head: FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 1

Topic: Film Review Type: Analytical Essay Subject: Geography

Academic Level: Undergraduate Style: APA Language: English (U.S)

Number of Pages: 3 (double-spaced, Times New Roman, Font 12)

Written by: https://writersperhour.com

Number of sources: 4

Task Details

The purpose of this review is to examine how work, workers, and

Space are related in the film. This is a 3 page, double space paper. Keep the review succinct,

analytical rather than summative, and relevant to the course. You should focus on 2-3 themes

covered in the course that help you relate the film or song to labor geography (ex.: exploitation;

post-Fordism; social reproduction; etc.) Consider how these themes are spatial (ex.: Where is the

workplace and how is it spatially organized? How is the workplace designed and how does

design shape power relations therein? What is your relationship to workers in other places?) Cite

and discuss 2 or more academic articles to reinforce your thesis and main arguments. Organize

your review as you would do for a standard academic essay, including a thesis statement,

introduction, body, and conclusion. Choose any film/song that interests you

FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 2

FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 3

Fishing in the Sea of Greed

The fundamentals of labor geography are largely in line with the concepts of human and

social geography, especially those pertaining economic, political, and social landscapes spatial

relations. In particular, this is what brings about the conceptualization of fundamentalisms of

societal constructions, including stratification, political power, economic systems, and human

geography; ultimately bringing forth the aspects of laborers or works in creating the definition of

economic/labor geography. In this review, the focus is to reveal the economic/labor geography

aspects in relation to themes of societal constructions, as well as the human geography, for

instance exploitation, social reproduction, spatial representations and Post-Fordism among others

through reviewing the documentary film; “Fishing in the Sea of Greed.”

Fishing in the Sea of Greed is a film that focuses on how traditional fishing communities

around the globe became threatened by industrialized fishing practices during the periods of

industrialization, which witnessed colossal factory fishing ships and private capital resulting to

fish in very large quantities for the purposes of production and resource capitalization (Icarus

Films, 2013). This in turn contributed to the displacement of the traditional fishing communities

and the communities, even became poverty-stricken as it is discussed in the subsequent

paragraphs of this paper's Fishing in the Sea of Greed film review with respect to defining some

of the central themes in economic/labor geography.

From the movie, the relation of exploitation and traditional working communities is depicted

from the transformation of traditional fishing methods to industrialize and mechanize fishing

methods from the developed world. Before industrialization and fishery mechanization,

FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 4

traditional communities "native Indians", mainly depended on fish as food for daily consumption

and supplemented the activity with farming on the adjacent lands of the sea. When

industrialization and fishing mechanization kicked in, the traditional communities realized a new

form of exploitation, that is, fish could not only be exploited as food for daily consumption but

also for the purposes of amassing wealth and improving living standards. This was through the

influence that the traditional communities gained from the work conditions created by the

developed world that now becomes part of them, thereby bringing about the concept of roles of

place, space, and scale in comprehending labor/economic geography.

Also, as a result of fish exploitation to amass wealth, private and international fishing

agencies emerged, leading to abuse of fisheries, the traditional communities organize themselves

into government and together with the global water corporations they advanced towards

promoting regulated fishing and alternative forms of economic exploitation such as agriculture.

In this case, they now not only fought for their fishing jobs in the industries, but also for the

survival of their ecosystem and economy. This precisely explains the spatial Praxis with the

relations of social phenomena of capitalism geography that defines clearly the geographical

theories of how workers contribute to determining national development, policy/political

formations, and economic landscapes around them (Castree, 2007).

Moreover, in the conceptualization of labor geography from the review of this film, the

factor of location and shift to mechanized and industrialized fishing to some extent defines the

theme of Post-Fordism. In particular, the traditional communities fished merely for consumption

purposes with non-mechanized and inflexible fishing methods in the earlier periods. With the

shift in fishing practices, it thus represents Post-Fordism definitions which in this case refer to

FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 5

flexible and mechanized production processes as well as a flexible workforce with dynamic and

emergent economies through mass production to acquire wealth, the creation of policies/

regulations to curb resource overexploitation and international economic regulations.

Besides Post-Fordism, the film also primarily depicts the nature of how humans develop

their economic geographies through social reproduction. This means that in terms of location,

traditional communities that particularly depended on agriculture, rice growing, from the

adjacent lands of the sea became widely affected by the abuse of fishing due to salination of

ground water and pollution of rivers from prawn processing industry's waste disposal. As such,

rice-growing farmers became poverty stricken while fishermen continued to amass wealth and

gained higher standards of living. In fact, most of the rice-growing farmers within years had to

abandon their farming lands to involve in insecure and precarious works to sustain their lives

because large tracts of their farming lands now became unfit for agriculture due to salination of

ground water and mass pollution of rivers.

This defines the constraints produced by economic geographies through the role that

capital plays in social reproduction. It reveals the social inequalities created by human vested

interests in creating capital and space in their selfish or self-reproduction ways as depicted from

the film. Essentially, this defines labor geography, especially through how workers influence and

create geographic space in a manner that determine the social stratification and power. As such,

this brings about the fact on how capital in geographic settings creates economic landscapes

where workers (communities) strive for survival as well as self-reproduction, ultimately bringing

about economic geography of capitalism – workers in a capitalist society – transmitting social

FILM REVIEW BASED ON LABOR GEOGRAPHY 6

inequality from one generation to another through social reproduction posed by precarious

working experiences and uneven production patterns (Clark, Gertler & Feldman, 2003).

References

Castree, N. (2007). Labor geography: a work in progress. International Journal of Urban and

Regional Research, 31 (4), 853-862.

Clark, G. L., Gertler, M. S., & Feldman, M. P. (2003). The Oxford handbook of economic

geography. Oxford University Press.

Icarus Films. (2013). Fishing in the Sea of Greed. Accessed 4th February, 2015 from http://

icarusfilms.com/new98/seagreed.html

Lier, D. C. (2007). Places of work, scales of organizing: a review of labor geography. Geography

Compass, 1 (4), 814-833.

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