Presentation short abstract

Grounded in ignorance studies and amphibious ontologies, Littoral Political Ecology queers terrestrial political ecology by foregrounding the lived experiences of fishers as they negotiate uncertainty and collaborate with more-than-human agents to contest state-sponsored erasures.

Presentation long abstract

I offer Littoral Political Ecology (LPE) as a tentative southern conceptual framework that emerges from reflections on the fisher struggle for the Ennore–Pulicat wetlands in Chennai, India. Grounded in amphibious ontologies, LPE extends political ecology's emerging engagement with uncertainty, risk and vulnerability in the littoral by examining power and the state's spatial visions using ignorance as a lens. Rather than denoting absence, ignorance here refers to the strategic production of non-knowledge to erase, desiccate, and flatten littoral worlds —through withheld measurements, cartographic erasures and the abstraction of lived spaces, regulatory ambiguity, and technocratic framings of uncertainty. By revealing the ignorance tactics underlying the state’s mode of spatial production and foregrounding how fishers negotiate uncertainty, precarity and state-sponsored erasures, LPE does not merely deconstruct capitalist designs, it makes visible the insurrectionary acts of resistance that assert ways of living within, against and beyond capitalism. Amidst warming seas and intensifying Blue Economy ambitions, the littoral becomes not only a site of conflict but also a method for theorising how coastal worlds are governed, inhabited, and contested. Learning from the struggles and cosmology of Tamil artisanal fishers, LPE offers a southern lens for reimagining coastal ecologies amid rising oceanic pressures.