Wet Ontologies and Ocean Governance

 

From Social Construction to Wet Ontology

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Although there was very little work on the geography of the ocean when I began working on the topic in the mid-1990s or when I published The Social Construction of the Ocean in 2001, in the following years there rapidly emerged a number of scholars exploring the geography of the ocean: its mobility; its depth; its voluminous, multi-species materiality; its political status (mostly) outside sovereign territory; its economic function that is is so crucial to state power; its historic and ongoing role in nurturing dreams for expanding authority to distant lands or for imagining alternative futures.

Noting these advances in the discipline, in 2012 Kimberley Peters and I began discussing how we could take the human geography of the ocean to another level: using the ocean’s materiality to think through not just the geography of the ocean (as a bounded socio-natural space) but, more broadly, to inform a new perspective on the world writ large. As Kim began thinking through these questions through her perspective rooted in cultural geography, mobility studies, and the phenomenology and materiality of maritime navigation, I began to think through related questions with specific reference to the writings of Carl Schmitt (see my chapter in Spatiality Sovereignty, and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011)) and the concept of the ocean region (see my 2013 article ‘Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions‘ in Atlantic Studies). My contributions to the project also draw on my earlier work on the ways in which the ocean seeps into our imagination through maps, film, utopian visions, and environmentalist discourses, as well as my ongoing projects on sea ice and the Arctic marine environment.

Thus emerged our ‘Wet Ontologies’ project, which to date has resulted in three articles, an autobiographical online photo-essay, and a closely related book:

  • Volume and vision: toward a wet ontology (with Kimberley Peters, in Harvard Design Magazine, 2014) | Website
  • Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking (with Kimberley Peters, in Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 2015) | PDF (behind paywall)
  • A wet world: rethinking place, territory, and time (with Kimberley Peters, Society & Space open site, 2015) | Open Access Website
  • Territory beyond Terra (edited with Kimberley Peters & Elaine Stratford, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018) | Website
  • The ocean in excess: toward a more-than-wet ontology (with Kimberley Peters, in Dialogues in Human Geography, 2019) | PDF (behind paywall) [For a debate surrounding this article — with contributions from Stefan Helmreich, Charity Edwards, Gordon Winder, Jon Anderson, Sasha Engelmann, and Christopher Bear, as well as the authors’ response — see the entire issue of Dialogues]

Taking Wet Ontologies in New Directions

Paralleling my main ‘Wet Ontologies’ proect with Kimberley Peters is an ongoing conversation that I have been having with my Durham University colleagues Elizabeth R. Johnson and Jessica Lehman, where we explore the ocean as a space that is simultaneously material and metaphorical. Our first joint article is:

  • Turbulent waters in three parts (with Jessica Lehman and Elizabeth R. Johnson), in Theory & Event, 2021 | PDF (behind paywall)

A further expansion of this project has taken me into an engagement with literature on race, memorialisation, and Caribbean perspectives on the ocean. This was the subject of my 2021 Political Geography plenary lecture at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, which combines my interest in the ocean with earlier work on urban planning, race, social movements, memorialisation, and non-representational art. The work resulted in:

  • Blue planet, Black lives: Matter, materiality, and the temporalities of political geography, in Political Geography, Vol. 96 (June 2022) | PDF (behind paywall) [For a debate surrounding this article — with contributions from Astrida Neimanis, Jonathan Pugh, and Ife Okafor-Yarwood, as well as my response — see the entire issue of Political Geography]

Additionally, a recording of the AAG plenary lecture is available in the videos section of this website.

I have also explored links between the ocean and critical perspectives on race and colonialism in a review essay on Paul Carter’s Decolonizing Governance: Archipelagic Thinking:

  • Oceans, islands, closets and smells: Decolonization through spatial metaphors, in Postcolonial Studies, 2021 | PDF (behind paywall)

A further exploration of linkages between oceanic and decolonial thinking can be found in my forthcoming book chapter ‘Telling stories from the sea: Melville, Gilroy, and the spatiality of water logics,’ forthcoming in the edited volume resulting from the Water Logics conference held at Tulane University in 2019.

I am also exploring some of these themes further in a special issue of Social & Cultural Geography ‘From the intersection ship to the trans-actional ocean: A dialogue between critical ocean geographies and Black studies’, which I am co-editing with Gabriella Palermo.

From Wet Ontologies to Ocean Governance

Although the bulk of my non-Arctic ocean work has been largely conceptual or historical (or both), my original studies of the ocean arose from an interest in deep seabed mining and I remain active in seabed governance debates, including through co-leading the Seabed Working Group in the European Union’s COST action on Ocean Governance (OCEANGOV), which ran from 2016-2020. Recent publications in this area include:

  • Scientific rationale and international obligations for protection of active hydrothermal vent ecosystems from deep-sea mining (with C. Van Dover, S. Arnaud-Haond, M. Gianni, S. Helmreich, J.A. Huber, A.L. Jaeckel, A. Metaxas, L.H. Pendelton, S. Petersen, E. Ramirez-Llodra, V. Tunnicliff, & H. Yamamoto), in Marine Policy, 2018 | Open Access Website
  • The ocean as frontier, in International Social Science Journal, 2018 | PDF (behind paywall)
  • A critical social perspective on seep sea mining: Lessons from the emergent industry in Japan (with Rosanna Carver, John Childs, Leslie Mabon, Hiroyuki Matsuda, Rachael Squire, Ben McLellan, & Miguel Esteban), in Ocean & Coastal Management, 2020 | Open Access Website
  • Mining questions of ‘what’ and ‘who’: Deepening discussions of the seabed for policy and governance (with Marta Conde, Aletta Mondré, and Kimberley Peters), in Maritime Studies, 2022 | Open Access Website

An Ocean of Ocean Geography

Since 1999, I have published a number of reviews of ocean geography literature as well as introductions for students and scholars new to the subfield. If you’re new to ocean geography, you might want to check out some of these overview pieces (even if they’re getting a bit dated), including:

  • The geography of ocean-space, The Professional Geographer (1999) [Introduction to focus section on ocean geography] | PDF (behind paywall)
  • Oceans, in Elsevier International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (2009) | PDF (behind paywall)
  • Oceans, in Oxford Bibliography of Geography (2013) | PDF (behind paywall)
  • Oceans and seas: Human geography, in AAG International Encyclopedia of Geography (2017) | PDF (behind paywall)

Of course, there are plenty of good overviews written by other people as well. See, for instance, Kimberley Peters’ ‘Future promises’ review piece in Geography Compass (2010,) her ‘Oceans and seas: Physical geography’ entry in the 2017 AAG Encyclopdia, and the introductory chapter to Anderson and Peters’ Water Worlds (2014). For a more complete list of articles, encyclopedia entries, and books that provide overviews of ocean geography (and related areas of critical cultural/legal/environmental/literary studies of the sea), see footnote 1 in ‘Turbulent waters in three parts’ by Lehman et al. (2021).

My most recent, and most complete, venture in this direction has been co-editing the 32-chapter Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space with Kimberley Peters, Jon Anderson, and Andy Davies.

  • The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space (edited with Kimberley Peters, Jon Anderson, & Andy Davies, 2022), London: Routledge | Website