Short abstract:

In this contribution, we aim to conceptually expand how marine scientists engage with the sea along drastic environmental transformations. We will think about the relationship between scientists and the sea along three dimensions: environmental, academic and political time.

Long abstract:

Marine scientists report drastic environmental transformations in marine and polar regions as a result of pollution and climate change. Following transformations in the ways in which they research the ocean, e.g. through technological mediations, the relationship between scientists and the ocean is changing, in the wider context of ocean politics. This changing relationship is tangible in narratives about the sea, in which the sea is increasingly portrayed as an environmental concern, a fragile entity, while also sometimes a source of hope, bringing scientists' emotions to the surface. In this presentation we want to further explore the relationship between scientific work, environmental changes and political in/action. To do so, we think through dimensions of time to open-up the transforming relationship between scientists and the sea across three completed and two current research projects in which we study marine science. We will carve out the timescapes (Adams 1998, Vostal 2021) that are attached to the work of marine scientists and their academic living spaces (Felt 2009). For instance, times and tempos provide a format for scientists' engagement with the ocean: working on fast-paced scientific careers, spending precious time on research vessels, combining short- and long-term studies, researching effects of environmental changes that often originated before they started their career. Focusing on timescapes helps us to think about the relationship between scientists and the ocean along three dimensions: environmental, academic and political time. We aim to conceptually expand how engagement with the sea, its current and future challenges and promises transform human-ocean relations.

Short abstract:

Our ocean’s role as carbon sink requires marine carbon observations for predicting its future capacity. Employing STS approaches, this study delves into complexities of marine carbon observations, emphasizing human, non-human and geopolitical agencies to provide insights into their (de)stabilization

Long abstract:

Our ocean plays an important role as a carbon sink. To predict our ocean’s future capability of storing anthropogenic emissions and to calculate climate change scenarios, marine carbon observations are crucial. They require cross-sectoral collaboration of science, the private sector (e.g., shipping companies, sensor manufacturers) and non-humans.

Yet, empirical research on environmental degradation and climate change using approaches of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and new materialism are still dominated by terrestrial case studies lacking empirical insights from marine worlds. Moreover, the material embeddedness of research phenomena in marine realms, such as geo-political processes, remain overseen in scientific discourses so far. However, we know little about the knowledge-production processes and the actual practices within marine carbon observations.

The paper examines how and under which conditions marine carbon observations emerge and asks: How are they stabilized and destabilized and which role do geo-political entanglements play? Conceptually and methodologically, the study addresses these questions based on multi-sited ethnography, STS approaches and multi-modal materials including participant observation and semi-structured interviews with marine scientists and technicians working on marine carbon observations.

Short abstract:

Emerging wind energy seascapes in the Dutch North Sea hold implications for marine life. Technoscientific innovations are being developed to monitor and mitigate biodiversity loss. The inscription of competing values and assumptions in these innovations can (re)shape future human-ocean relations.

Long abstract:

The massive expansion of wind energy in the North Sea holds significant implications for marine biodiversity. ‘Hard’ wind energy infrastructure can both enhance biodiversity by providing hard substrates and cryptic reef-like habitats, or degrade biodiversity by disturbing existing benthic and pelagic habitat. The question is what kinds of biodiversity might be enhanced and in whose interest. To assess the effects of offshore wind energy parks on biodiversity, a range of new sampling technologies are being developed, including automated monitoring technologies that incorporate environmental DNA (eDNA) and video camera. How these technologies observe which kinds of biodiversity starts with their design; with different values, ways of knowing and worldviews of biodiversity inscribed into material sampling technologies and their deployment. This paper outlines an approach for exploring which assumptions and understandings of biodiversity influence the design of these sampling technologies. It also discusses what implications the use of these technologies, and the data they generate may have for claims over biodiversity (protection, restoration, and enhancement) in the tendering process for offshore wind energy parks. These findings hold implications for governing the assessment, mitigation and possible enhancement of marine biodiversity.

Short abstract:

Much of what we know about the oceans today relies upon acoustic data translated into visual and other formats. This exploratory paper considers what it means to see with sound at the interface of technology and extreme environments, and the kinds of underwater worlds and futures which result.

Long abstract:

In recent decades, historians have traced the enduring human fascination with the sea(s), drawing attention both to the long history of “plumbing the deep” with simple instruments thrown overboard wave-tossed seacraft and increasingly complex, technologically-mediated efforts to map and explore marine worlds, a project which gained traction in the nineteenth century, altering the relationship between humans and oceans with ongoing ripples of influence. Today, much of what we know about the oceans and seas is intimately bound up with, and deeply dependent upon, acoustic techniques of single- and multibeam echo sounding which use the properties of sound underwater to construct data that can be translated into images of otherwise un-seeable environments. But what does it mean to see with sound in these ways – and what are the resulting effects of these techniques and artifacts upon the shape of the underwater worlds they produce? Are there ways in which we reproduce the totality of our own social and political worlds within these spaces – a kind of Foucauldian heterotopic waterscape? This exploratory paper seeks to build upon the work of scientists, humanists, and STS scholars to consider how sound and sense are made (and made perceptible) at the interface of technology and extreme environments underwater and, relatedly, how ocean environs, underwater soundscapes, noise pollution, and climate futures are constructed, imagined, and productively deployed, even as marine scientists increasingly call for greater globalization, data sharing, and international, interdisciplinary cooperation toward the longstanding goal of mapping the entirety of earth's ocean floor.

Short abstract:

The study presents a case of collective adaptation among the local fishing communities amid climate and anthropogenic change in the Caspian Sea. It occurs through sharing knowledge and technology to redefine norms and values in fishing practices and regain their agency in the adaptation.

Long abstract:

The Caspian Sea faces profound changes from climate and anthropogenic influences, including receding water levels, eutrophication, and rising temperatures. This has further exacerbated the already challenging conditions faced by artisanal fishers. The historic and large-scale oil and gas extraction from the Caspian Sea has adversely affected the fish population and migration patterns, and the overarching alterations to the sea related to climate change have resulted in the arrival of invasive species and diminishing fish diversity, quality and abundance

In the midst of these transformations, artisanal fishers are encountering new ways to adapt and relate to the Caspian Sea, fostering collective practices in contrast to conflict-driven responses elsewhere. These include the pooling of resources to acquire low-cost technologies like GPS trackers and life vests, enabling navigation in deeper waters. WhatsApp groups and gatherings at Cayxanas (tea houses) facilitate the exchange of information on weather events, migration patterns, and recipes for preparing fish that was previously considered “poor mans’ food. Rooted in a fishermen’s code of conduct emphasizing territorial respect and equitable fish distribution, fishermen engage in these practices in an effort to sustain their families and preserve fishing culture.

This paper presents a compelling case of solidarity-driven adaptation, reshaping norms, values, and knowledge in fishing communities. In doing so, this paper contributes to understanding the evolving epistemic and sociotechnical dynamics that reshape relations with the sea.

Short abstract:

Based on years of ethnographic research conducted at the UN, this paper takes a decolonial approach to ocean governance by challenging its allegiance to Western-styled technoscience—instrumentalist, expansionist, anthropocentric—as a means or rationalization to colonize the Earth.

Long abstract:

“Abolition without ecology.” That’s a phrase developed by Malcom Ferdinand to capture the modern condition according to the “double fracture,” or the artifical, arbitrary separation of environmental harm from forms of social, political, and economic injustice endured by colonized peoples. Although the abolition of slavery rightly focused on the emancipation of peoples, it left unattended the centuries of exploitation and subsequent destruction of the Earth—foundational to the very logic of life on the plantation and aboard the slave ship. How, then, might a decolonial approach to ocean governance help us understand better why ferocious assults on marine life continue unabated? This paper shares ethnographic snapshots from fieldwork conducted at the UN Ocean Conferences in 2017 (New York) and 2022 (Lisbon) and of negotiations for the treaty Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Together they expose a global power structure rooted in colonialization, not as a fixed spatial geography or historical relic but alive as a dispersed commonsense at once cultural, social, political, and economic. Instrumentalist, expansionist, anthropocentric—as if the ocean is a “resource” to be conquered and controlled or “sustainably used” by elites—technoscience finds its origins in Anglo-European ways of knowing and has become by legal fiat the master’s tool adopted by policymakers to achieve domination over the sea. At cross purposes with growing consciousness against the human as superior planetary being, technoscience remains wed to an exploitative sensibility that pervades Western-styled techno-managerialism as rationalization to colonize the Earth.

Short abstract:

Why, how, and for whom are the global oceans becoming an engine of climate research, action, and politics? A comparison of the sociotechnical imaginaries that animate research into ocean-based negative emissions technologies in the US, Germany, and Australia reveals a distinctive style of reasoning.

Long abstract:

Why, how, and for whom are the global oceans becoming an engine of climate research, action, and politics? What exactly is an ocean-based “negative emissions technology” (NET) and what can it tell us about changing uses and understandings of marine life and worlds?

Marine geoengineering research claims to prime its promises with geopolitical context if not restraint through concepts like “transboundary effects,” “systemic risk,” or “moral hazard.” Yet highlighting “knowledge gaps”—between, for example, research and deployment or measurement and regulation—may not so much interrogate as prepare the reasonableness of engineering ocean life and worlds. Can a broader view of knowing—one that emphasizes the critical potential of STS scholarship to detect the drives of capital, knowledge/power, and technofuturism—hold open the straightforwardly pressing question of why transforming the oceans into a planetary-scale carbon “net” can pass for a seemingly “normal” thing to want to do?

To address these questions, I venture some interpretations of the current trajectory of research and development into ocean-based NETs in the US, Germany, and Australia. First, I test the usefulness of sociotechnical imaginaries for showing how these different geographic but also politico-moral contexts of inquiry offer fertile ground for the same proposed marine transformation. I then analyze this transformation as “net thinking,” a style of reasoning that connects negative emissions technologies with net-zero forecasts in an aspirationally total description of global environmental change. I close with some suggestions for how to get out from under the net by engaging the writings of Iris Murdoch.

Short abstract:

This contribution explicates the knowledge practices that underpin the production of the various forms of advice (Fisheries Advice, Ecosystem Advice, Special Requests) produced by one of the most influential international marine science organizations – ICES.

Long abstract:

My contribution focuses on what Borie et al. (2021) call “institutional epistemologies” within scientific advisory organizations. Drawing upon their study, I provide insights into the knowledge practices of the “world’s first intergovernmental marine science organization” (Rozwadowski, 2004, p. 42, 2002) – an organization that De Donà & Linke (2023) even call “the IPCC of the oceans”, namely ICES (International Council for the Exploration of the Sea). I elaborate on ICES’s scoping practices (how is legitimate participation in knowledge creation enacted?), its standardization practices (how is commensurability, e.g., of concepts or futuring modes, enacted?), its representational practices (how is knowledge given form?), and its public practices (how are knowledge and data shared?).

My data come from about 30 qualitative interviews with representatives of ICES as well as its neighboring organizations (e.g., Advice Requesters, National Fisheries Institutes, Ministries), that I conducted during the last year, and event ethnography of scientific as well as committee meetings conducted as part of the ICES’s Annual Science Conference 2023 (09/23).

Building on previous STS as well as non-STS work on ICES (Ballesteros et al., 2018; Ballesteros & Dickey-Collas, 2023; Cvitanovic et al., 2024; Cvitanovic, Mackay, et al., 2021; Cvitanovic, Shellock, et al., 2021; e.g., Nielsen, 2008; Wilson, 2009), I theorize that ICES is currently experiencing a fundamental controversy over its knowledge practices: The legacy of the stock assessment approach pulls toward a “view from nowhere” (similar to IPCC), while the ecosystem approach calls for a shift to a “view from everywhere” (similar to IPBES).

Short abstract:

Oceanic futures emerge from scientific relationships with the DSM sediment discharge plume. Combining anthropology with STS studies, I show how this mining waste is produced and 'seen' in a multispecies dialogue.

Long abstract:

The underwater, akin to the underground, emerges through interconnected political, economic, cultural, and technoscientific processes (Kinchy, Phadke, Smith, 2018). Understanding how the knowledge production of engineers and scientists intersects with political decision-making about deep-sea mining (DSM) is critical for exploring oceanic future scenarios. This paper focuses on the sediment plume (the "discharge plume"): a mid-water cloud consisting of a mixture of dissolved metals and suspended particulates, generated by DSM surface vessel operations. Thinking about the past and future of the ocean requires attention to this material waste.

Combining the anthropological approach with STS studies is crucial to exploring how scientists "see" sediment plumes, both in terms of observing the underwater world through robotic eyes and "interpreting" this intangible and fluid material as either "waste" or "harmless disorder". This exploration reveals how the DSM's "social license to operate" is constructed through a specific process of dialogue with non-humans (ROVs, seafloor sediments, benthic currents, etc.). Indeed, the concentration of the sediment plume depends on the design of the ROVs used to collect the nodules, as well as the specific marine area in which the operations are carried out. Rather than focusing on the monstrosity of the underwater robots, this paper endeavors to explore the multiple entanglements associated with DSM underwater waste, assigning to the sediment plume an "analytical and ethnopolitical space" and its "right to exist" (Ureta, Flores, 2022: 10).

Short abstract:

The ocean is increasingly valued for its capacities as a carbon sink. This paper connects emerging marine carbon activities with historical practices of oceanic waste disposal to add insight on the nature of risk, experimentation, and contamination in contemporary seas.

Long abstract:

The ocean is increasingly valued not simply as resource or territory but for its capacity to absorb and sequester carbon and thus to buffer the planet from the effects of climate change. From storing carbon under the seabed to enhancing ocean alkalinity, from planting mangroves to sinking biomass into the deep, the ocean is becoming the site of numerous experimental practices of carbon management. Yet these activities often occur out of sight, concerning materials and dynamics that are poorly understood and difficult to envision, and entangle different sites and scales in highly complex ways. Nonetheless, these experimental engagements are highly significant to contemporary understandings of the ocean and its relation to planetary life. This paper uses technoscientific engagements with marine carbon to explore the significance of emerging notions of the ocean as a climatic buffer. Crucially, this entails not simply emphasising the novelty of these practices, but also the ways in which they are shaped by previous exploitation of the ocean, such as nuclear waste disposal at sea. Drawing connections with the technoscientific practices and politics of nuclear waste can, I argue, add insight into how risk and experimentation are understood in an increasingly volatile sea, and provide orientation toward ethical oceanic engagements in a time of climate crisis and contamination.

Short abstract:

This paper explores one key reason for the weakness of most attempts to enact a blue bioeconomy: the reductionistic ways in which they deal with the agencies of marine entities, opting for docile versions that could be easily traded on markets at the expense of their biological complexity.

Long abstract:

In recent years the concept of the blue bioeconomies (BB) has been presented as a way for marine-based industries to break with traditional models of relentless extraction and extensive damage. Centering on innovation and biotechnological enhancement, BB promises future marine-based economies of continual growth and sustainability. In practice it has proven quite hard to materialize these promises, the bioeconomy still mostly an object of imagination rather than a reality. On this paper we are going to explore one key reason for this lack of effect: the reductionistic ways in which most BB proposals deal with the agencies of marine entities. Adopting a conceptual frame from science and technology studies (STS), it will understand this engagement as “pacification”, or a strategy based on producing neat and simple versions of these beings that could be easily traded on markets, at the expense of their biological complexity. To explore the ways on which pacification works the paper analyzes current attempts at renovating the seaweed industry in Chile. Through the analysis of two BB-inspired policy proposals – one focused on turning seaweed into the basis of a blue carbon economy and the other into high-end “novel foods” for export – it will present them as producing highly pacified versions of seaweed that bear little resemblance with the complex beings populating Chilean seas. Pacified seaweed comes very handy for market-oriented policy proposals but tend to fare quite poorly beyond them.

Short abstract:

This paper discusses the concept of metabolism in reshaping more-than-human relationships in the context of the ocean, focusing on biomaterials derived from discarded oyster shells in Japan.

Long abstract:

Metabolic ideas have the potential to change how we conceptualise material entities as they reshape, circulate, and transform the social life of humans and nonhumans in the Anthropocene. Marx classically described the “metabolic rift” as the alienation of life that takes place with the input and output of energy, chemical reactions, nutrient cycling, biochemical processes, and the exchange of matter.

In this paper, I will explore the concept of the “metabolic” within the ocean context, with a specific focus on two ethnographic case studies involving biomaterials derived from discarded oyster shells in Japan: discarded oyster shells that undergo transformation into poultry feed and agricultural and aquaculture lime fertilizer, promoting microorganism activation both in soil and sea; and oyster larvae collectors made from powdered oyster shells and magnesium hydroxide, a byproduct of salt production.

These modes of circular production establish an optimal environment for shellfish larval attachment and survival, responding to ecological threats such as overfishing, red tide, and land reclamation in clam habitats. As oyster larvae settle and grow on the collectors, what biosocial assemblage emerges? Examining the material transformations of human and nonhuman worlds in their engagement with the seas and inhabitants, I delve into how biomaterial production, circulation, and consumption influence the outcome of the metabolic rift – the impact of a capitalist mode of industrial production that disrupts human–nature relationships.

Short abstract:

In a challenging funding landscape and in the midst of climate breakdown, ocean researchers struggle to negotiate the tensions between objectivity and credibility in their knowledge making practices. This paper suggests that research needs politics in order to transform oceanic futures.

Long abstract:

Ocean research has always been heavily reliant on the financial support of private, military, and industry actors (Oreskes 2023). Under neoliberal governance regimes determined to cut public expenditure on research (c.f. Scholten et. al. 2021) or ensure its value to society (Hessels et. al. 2009), ocean research institutes are increasingly structurally dependent on external funding, for example from excellence grants or collaborations with industry partners. While individual ocean researchers are deeply troubled by industry collaborations, prompted in part by recent public debates about fossil fuels, many also feel they have little choice but to engage. Ocean research is expensive and the sea imperiled by many industry activities.

This paper follows one ocean research department’s attempts to engage, reconcile and renegotiate its relation to industry through scientific collaboration. Under what conditions do ocean researchers feel they should engage with or withdraw from collaborations with industry? Does refraining from industry collaboration change what knowledge is made, and does this transform potential ocean futures? Discussions about these collaborations immediately highlighted researchers’ concerns about research funding and the relation between scientific objectivity and their own credibility. My interlocutors found themselves trapped by the opposition between objectivity and subjectivity as framed both by public discourse and traditional Popperian values of a distant and disinterested science. I suggest that a move toward a situational mode (c.f. Haraway 1988) of knowledge making orients researchers to the ways in which good research needs politics in order to transform relations with, to, and from ocean futures.