Presentation short abstract

A multispecies ethnography of Flensborg Fjord shows how ecological crisis and haunting absences blur borders. Murky waters, species decline, and cross-border care unsettle state logics and reveal watery, more-than-human border ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores how Flensborg Fjord, a body of water between Denmark and Germany, reshapes border ecologies through more-than-human entanglements. Based on multispecies ethnography and fieldwork above and below the waterline, we attend to how a wide range of actors engage in bordering practices aimed at constraining the effects of what is now widely recognised as an environmental disaster. We show how the fjord’s murky conditions produce a form of bordering that is continually undone by the agencies of water, species, and submerged histories. Divers describe entering “another world,” where visibility collapses into green haze and presence is sensed through absence; anglers speak of a fjord that feels “empty,” haunted by disappearing fish; restoration teams struggle with eelgrass that drifts, uproots, or refuses to survive. War-era remnants, corroding in the sediment, leak toxic traces into the present, further blurring temporal and ecological boundaries. These entanglements reveal a landscape where haunting is not only metaphor but also a sensory and political condition. In this context civil society groups, scientists, and local officials engage in forms of care and repair that cross the border despite fragmented governance. Thus, seeing borders through water - the way that that the human eye sees in water - becomes an uncanny representation of governance itself. We argue that the fjord exemplifies how watery ecologies unsettle static state-based logics of containment, and how more-than-human agencies complicate, disrupt, and exceed the bordering practices meant to manage them.