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Paper short abstract

The paper examines seabed mining as a contentious frontier by outlining forms of knowledge production in the Pacific Ocean. It traces how scientific and tacit ocean knowledges generate forms of sea-sight and sea-blindness, rendering the seabed a site of speculative political contestation.

Paper long abstract

Seabed mining is emerging as a new frontier of resource extraction, framed by extractive industries as a necessary displacement-less source of critical minerals, even as NGOs and UN country delegations call for moratoriums and warn that its knowledge base remains deeply uncertain. This paper explores how forms of sea-blindness and sea-sight are actively generated and contested in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico as this yet-to-be speculative frontier takes shape.

Moving beyond “just” scientific forms of knowledge production on seabed mining that have been the subject of recent scholarship, this paper ethnographically follows the contentious encounters between the fast-paced multilateral knowledge production of the International Seabed Authority and an artisanal fishing cooperative that successfully fought off a prospected seabed mine off the coast of Baja California. Through this ethnographic movement across scales and sites, specific ways of knowing the Pacific Ocean and its extractive potential emerge in a political struggle that contrasts the speed and techno-materiality of scientific knowledge production with the tacit, lived experience of ocean ecologies. By teasing out the tacit, more-than-human, and scientific knowledge production of two mining patches—one cancelled within the Mexican exclusive economic zone and one planned 500 km beyond it—I outline this resource frontier and blur its boundaries. The ethnography thus shows how this contentious frontier emerges through speculative forms of knowing that blur the lines between veracity and disinformation, sea-sight and sea-blindness.