Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork from a variety of maritime spaces and actors: with sailors onboard cargo ships, with the Coast Guard in the Philippines, and with maritime organizations, to think through the sea’s “transformative potential for alternative hopeful futures.”

Paper long abstract:

Thinking through the sea allows us to consider things differently. This paper draws on long-term multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork from a variety of maritime spaces, such as with sailors onboard cargo-ships, with the Coast Guard in the Philippines, and with maritime organizations such as the International Maritime Organization, in an attempt to think through the sea’s “transformative potential for alternative hopeful futures.” Maritime policymakers navigate multiple interests while maritime industry stakeholders speculate what technologies will become more profitable with zero-carbon emissions being an emerging industry goal. Seafarers onboard merchant ships have to find a balance with the new demands on their time and labor that new regulations and environmental requirements entail. Finally, coast guard personnel in the Philippines navigate the territorial waters and nautical highways of their archipelagic nation to straddle environmental enforcements with limited funds and technologies. Ethnographic insights from these different forms of sea-work allow me to explore how the sea as a space that is both a global “commons” and resource to be managed for the future of the planet and an “uncommon” space, different from land, is full of contradictions to be navigated and also full of potential for imagining more hopeful futures.