Helen Cho’s The Working Waterfront Is Out from AES Press

The Working Waterfront, by Helen Cho, was published by AES Press on December 1, 2025. The book reports ten years of interviews with 186 households in four harbor towns, including Calder Bay. It is the fall text in ECON 342, Coastal Economies, and it is on the open shelf at the Seacliff Library. The price from the press is $28 in paper.

What the interviews asked

Cho and two graduate students returned to the same households in 2015, 2019, and 2024. They asked about work, rent, school enrollment, and whether anyone in the household had left the county for a job. They did not ask people to predict the future of the fishery. The tables in chapter 4 show that households with a child under 18 were more likely to leave after a school closure than after a poor fishing season. That finding is also the 2025 paper with Marcus Ellison in the Journal of Rural Studies.

People will tell you the season was bad. They will move when the school closes. The book is about keeping those two facts in the same chapter.

How the press handled consent

Towns are named. Households are not. Each quoted person reviewed the paragraph in which they appear and could withdraw it. Eleven households withdrew a passage in the last round. The withdrawals are noted in the methods appendix, which is unusual and which Cho insisted on. The Institutional Review Board protocol number is AES-IRB-2014-088, renewed through 2026.