Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects upon the entanglements of sand, life, and death along and around the Buzi River delta, Central Mozambique. It looks at how people navigate through loss, displacement, unpredictability, but also resist (the effects of) environmental change by engaging with sand.

Paper long abstract:

"This terra (dirt, sand) wasn’t from here; ...the colour and sound are different.” Ana tells me while sweeping the sand around her housing plot. “Anyhow, this is my terra (land).” In 2019, tropical cyclone Idai made landfall in Central Mozambique. Extreme winds, heavy rains, followed by days of flooding, left behind a trace of destruction. Ana lost relatives and friends, some of whom were never retrieved. She speaks of grief in front of an immense Mango tree packed with unripened mangoes. “The land is now more fertile,” she eventually concedes.

I travel in a crowded boat from the town of Buzi to the coastal city of Beira. I’m given a place next to the skipper, over the humid sand that piles on the rear. It’s sand from Praia Nova, Beira’s beachside informal neighbourhood where the skipper lives. Sand is what enables the boat to sail, as its weight ensures the underpowered engine reaches the water. Pointing to a bank of silt that stretches from the riverside, where we can see people loading buckets of sand for construction, he nestles himself onto the sand and says “sand can be tricky”.

In this piece, I introduce a collection of ethnographic vignettes arising from recent fieldwork along and around the Buzi River delta to reflect upon how sand (dirt, silt, dust), life, and death are locally entangled. The paper sensorially and theoretically explores how people navigate through loss, displacement, unpredictability, but also resist (the effects of) environmental change by engaging with sand.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses sand as a vehicle to track geophysical movements and the human processes they incur. Grounded in land reclamation sites of Panama City from the early 20th century until today, it explores themes of degradation, displacement, and development embedded in anthropogenic landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

Sand is a constituent of almost all materials in the anthropogenic world, including roads, buildings, glass, clothing, pharmaceuticals, silicon chips and the very ground beneath our feet. Despite the importance of this under-appreciated and over-exploited resource, little attention is paid to the sedimentary transformations that form both our built environment and the foundation of our socio-spatial relationships. This paper uses sand as a vehicle to track geophysical movements and the human processes they incur, grounded in land reclamation sites of Panama City from the early 20th century until today. Calling on three moments in the history of Panama City’s urban expansion, namely 1) the excavation of the Panama Canal and simultaneous land reclamation to accommodate an influx of international workers, 2) a shift in the uses and users of reclaimed land following the construction of the Bridge of the Americas, and 3) modern land reclamation on the coast of Panama City for green space and luxury housing, this paper will tell a story of sand through the themes of environmental degradation, human movement, and urban development embedded in anthropogenic landscapes.

Paper short abstract:

Engaging with the prehistoric sands and shorelines of the Champlain Sea, this paper examines how sand (re)emerges to continually interact with the present. Tracing a variety of human practices as they relate to sand, this paper takes sand as a kind of anachronistic archive.

Paper long abstract:

At the end of the last ice age, that is about 13,000 years ago, the glaciers retreated from what is now Eastern Ontario. As they left, they gouged and scraped the landscape, leaving a depression in which the Champlain Sea persisted for about 3,000 years. Today, its remnants are the historic St.Lawrence River, the inlet of the Atlantic Ocean. Though the water has retreated, the history of the sea remains in fossils, clay soils, and sand. In this paper, I ‘unmake’ the concept of a coastal shore by tracing how prehistoric sands inflect contemporary inland life, (re)appearing across the landscape as humans terraform the environment. As early settlers farmed the land and depleted soils, the sand come to the surface, defying any sense that sediment remains buried or in order. The past, geologic and otherwise, does not necessarily stay buried but continually interacts with the present. Today, the sands of the Champlain Sea appear in numerous situations: buried below fertile agricultural soils; blowing across wastelands; extracted as a commodity; and made subject to erosion control measures in community forests. In each, history is revealed in different configurations. The earth is indeed a kind of archive (Ogden, 2021), but when read through sands, this paper will argue it is perhaps an anachronistic one. Shores are undone with time, and yet (re)emerge through shifting ecological and social relations. And there forever remains the possibility that the sea will come back in a flood.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on dust, sand, and smoke in an industrial town of Senegal, this paper explores how residents live with increasing breathing difficulties. It traces different forms and histories of sedimentary particles to analyse how citizens' geo-political struggles shape the contested coastal atmosphere.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the atmosphere of the coastal town of Bargny, now an industrial suburb of Senegal’s capital, Dakar, to understand how the inhabitants narrate, negotiate, and protest – as well as live with(in) – drifts and clouds of dust, sand and smoke. Once a traditional Lebou fishing village, Bargny is marked by a long history of industrialisation and a high concentration of fine dust particles (PM10) that exceeds the national regulatory limits by 400 times. Witnessing an increase in respiratory illnesses, from acute asthma cases to tuberculosis, the inhabitants are actively fighting the impacts of a colonial cement factory, a coal plant, and a new bulk port as well as the planned installation of a steel company. At the same time, they are threatened by the encroachment of the sea and coastal erosion that turn their houses into half ruins. This paper thinks different forms of sedimentary particles together – the increase of dusty and sandy particles in the air and the loss of sand along the coast. I attend to different layers and colours of sediments as they mix with other particles transported by the winds - such as black ashes from the coal plant - and are increasingly brought into public view through the inhabitants’ demonstrations. As the history of industrial pollution meets the erosion of the shore, I analyse how citizens' embodied stories and geo-political struggles create a particularly tumultuous and contested coastal atmosphere.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with multiple ways in which sand, mostly invisible in its everydayness and proximity, co-creates Mombasa’s land-sea interface and shapes life in this port city.It ethnographically traces practices of coastal protection, experiences of coastal transformation and heritage discourses

Paper long abstract:

Sand holds a meaningful position in urban coastal areas. As a commodity and building material it is indispensable for the city’s fabric; as coastal sediment, constantly moving between stasis and motion, it is indispensable for the coastal ecosystem. In the face of growing urbanization, climate change and rising sea levels, the value, use and purpose of sand varies between feeding urban neoliberal dreams (privatization, fortification, stabilization of the coast) or its role in naturally protecting the shoreline and maritime-oriented livelihoods.

Based on ethnographic research in Mombasa this paper traces the enmeshment of sand-human lifeworlds in the port city within the tension of an absent presence of sand in everyday littoral life.

By thinking with sand, the hard city of concrete can be seen as a fluid city of negotiations (Dawson 2023) and the shoreline as a relational space situated between terrestrial urban projects, granular matter and the marine ecosystem where complex socio-ecological interactions unfold.

This paper traces various practices of coastal protection, people’s experiences of the urban coast’s im/permanence and coastal heritage projects. Together this opens up new pathways to think about redistribution of expertise, how value is created and how the future of the city is imagined.

Questions are:

How does the city, sand and the sea converse and converge in creating new forms of everyday coastal urbanity?

Which pasts are remembered along the coast? Which futures are manifested and made permanent? By whom and for whom?

Paper short abstract:

This paper reckons with the liveliness of sand and the active role that it plays in shaping the socio-economic fabrics of the coastal communities in southwest Taiwan.

Paper long abstract:

For the residents along the southwest coast of Taiwan, sand is deeply intertwined with their livelihoods. Large offshore sandbars act as natural barriers, creating calm waters conducive for small boats and oyster racks in the inner sea; river sand that washes into the sea forms bottom sediment, a major nutrient source for marine life, thus supporting a still-thriving artisan fishery. Sand can also hinder human livelihoods, however: siltation in fishing harbors and navigation channels causes inconvenience and risks, and over-accumulation of sediment may impede the growth of oysters. Since the mid-20th century, coastal management authority has sought to control the flow of sand using modern engineering techniques, adjusting the distribution of sand between land and sea based on human needs. Despite their efforts and advancements, predicting and controlling the movements of sand remains challenging. This paper reckons with the connotations of the regional common saying, "sand is alive." I argue that, first, "alive" means not just "moving" but moving in ways beyond mechanical laws' predictions. Secondly, sand being "alive" conjures up Donna Haraway's concept of "lively commodity," referring to sand's capacity to generate value. The unceasing renewal and vitality of drifting sand, while complicating coastal management, serves as a continuous source of jobs, revenues, and social capital.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on interdisciplinary research with seabird marine-biologists, this paper explores how the shore, and that which washes up on the sand, both ground and make visible issues of marine plastic.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how the shore, and those who live and work among it, make visible and ground geosocial transformations relating to marine plastic that washes up upon the sand. This paper draws on interdisciplinary fieldwork with marine biologists studying shore-strewn seabirds on Lord Howe Island whose death is the result of marine plastic ingestion. In doing so, it explores how a granular attention to the shore makes transparent the opaque, yet large-scale, geosocial movements and necropolitics of plastic in the ocean. Contending with the concept of porosity, I explore how plastic moves between shores – permeating national boundaries, seabirds’ stomachs and the consciousnesses of scientists and shore-line citizens. I work with the scientists’ concept of these seabirds, in their death, being ‘sentinels’ of the larger environmental crisis of marine plastic pollution. Extrapolating on this, I engage with the idea of the ‘Plastiocene’ (Wilson, Symons & Lundmark 2019) to unpack the material and more-than-human entanglements visible on the shore when plastic is present, but also to undo broader ideas about the Anthropocene. I consider elemental agencies of tides, waves, and ocean currents that might deposit plastic among the sand, and how the absence of seabirds from shorelines, as a result of their deaths, can reshape island ecologies. Throughout this paper, in discussing this interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropology and marine biology, I gesture toward the ways in which such collaborations might contribute necessary theories for making liveable shores for both humans and non-humans.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation proposes the plot hole as a creative ethnographic methodology for unmasking the speculative transformation of territory in the Anthropocene. It will focus on one of the plot holes of Singapore’s geographic expansion: the strategic stockpiles of sand dotted around the island.

Paper long abstract:

While islands across the world are contending with their disappearance amidst rising tides, Singapore has been growing over the last six decades, as if in the throes of a geophysical puberty. Hundreds of millions of tonnes of sand dredged across coastal Southeast Asia have found their final resting place in Singapore's prosthetic territory. This fugitive sediment has been interred by the city-state’s reserve army of migrant workers, living in vast labour camps at the edges of the city, often abutting massive dunes of stockpiled sand, as the city-state’s prodigal appetite has rendered regional sand markets insecure. In 2019, Prime Minister announced that the city-state will spend $1 billion dollars a year until 2100 to mitigate sea level rise, with at least 200 more kilometres to reclaim from the sea. Singapore island’s earliest recorded name was Pulau Ujong, which meant ‘island at the end’. As the plans for 2100 loom, what will become of the island at the end of the world?

This presentation proposes the plot hole as a creative ethnographic methodology for unmasking this speculative transformation of territory. It will do so by focusing on one of the plot holes of Singapore’s geographic expansion: the strategic stockpiles of sand dotted around the island. While Singapore has reduced its reliance on imported sand, it will still need to import millions of tonnes in the years to come to fulfil these plans; the sand stockpile, then, is a figuration of capitalism’s geosocial asymmetries that demands interrogation.