Paper short abstract:

The dark, cold, hostile, unruly environment is an oft-repeated assertion about the seabed (Helmreich, 2009). This paper draws on the work of Helmreich (2011), sea as a theory machine, to provide alternative seabed meaning-making, surfacing messy relations between humans and seabed.

Paper long abstract:

A dark, cold, hostile environment or alien space is an oft-repeated assertion of the seabed (Helmreich, 2009). The stark social construction sketches the seabed as a submarine space devoid of humans, where geoscience is concerned only with the physical properties of the seabed. Nonetheless, the combination of the seabed with humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans has been removed from seabed discourses and narratives. To provide an alternative seabed meaning-making, this paper draws on the work of Helmreich (2011), the sea as a theory machine, to surface the inextricable human and seabed relations by re-visiting routine seabed uses. Re-visiting the seabed, in this case, is a process of remembering, reconnecting, rethinking, reimagining, and reconceptualizing or retheorizing the inextricable human and seabed relations. We use the example of seabed tin mining operations on Bangka and Belitung Islands in Indonesia to ponder the following questions; 1) How can thinking sea as a theory machine help surface inextricable relations between humans and the seabed? 2) How does the fluid, dynamic, and voluminous materiality of the sea (Steinberg and Peters, 2015) generate a different social construction of the seabed that spans multiple spatial and temporal dimensions? 3) How does the sea's materiality destabilize the fixed land-based territorial making used to govern the seabed uses?