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.