BIOrdinary Ocean Day

Conference

Date: Wednesday 13 December 2023

Time: 11.00 – 18.00

Location: B600, Södra Huset

Fluid Scales & Sea Times: Peoples, marine creatures and concepts beyond terracentric visions

Over the last decade anthropology has turned to bodies of water as social, cultural, and economic spaces, a move that Helmreich (2023) names the “Oceanic churn”. Oceans cover more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, yet a terracentric approach still pervades much of anthropological research. How can we move beyond terracentrism to embrace oceanic perspectives that challenge our theoretical frameworks, epistemologies, and ontologies?

The goal of BIOrdinary Ocean Day is to learn from anthropologists focusing their research on oceans, seascapes and rivers, with an emphasis on the multifaceted life-forms and projects unfolding in these spaces. The day’s speakers investigate climate-change induced transformations of more-than-human marine ecologies, fluid dispossessions emerging out of aquaculture scalability, and the trajectories of mobile sea creature and their involvements in shifting biodiversities. The aquacentric perspectives that we explore raise questions that unsettle land-based concepts and epistemologies. The unboundedness of the sea, for example, forces us to rethink ideas of territory and current property regimes, and ask instead
how the ocean creates visions of both limitless capitalist expansion and future multispecies commons (Lien 2023). Similarly, heat and mobility become important topics. While the ocean acts as a vital buffer for land-dwellers against the impacts of climate change, an aquacentric perspective reveals how oceans are places of mass migration, as sea creatures become some
of the first climate refugees.

By engaging with fluid scales, sea times, and fishy mobilities, the BIOrdinary Ocean Day seeks to unmoor anthropology and explore how stuff – inhabitants, concepts and methods – appear from the perspective of the sea and river. The day consist of seven presentations or provocations followed by longer, open discussions about topics and themes raised by the presenters.


Please join us!


Contact Karin Ahlberg for more information.

BIOrdinary Ocean Day Program (205 Kb)

 

Program
11.00-11.15 Welcome and FIKA
11.15-12.30

Session 1: Ownership, sovereignty & property
Chair: Karin Ahlberg, BIOrdinary, Stockholm University

Fluid Scalability; Frontiers and Commons in Salmon Waterworlds
Marianne Lien, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

King of the Golden Pool: Sovereignty, Monsoon Time, and Riparian Lives on the Mekong
Andrew Johnson, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University

12.30-13.45 LUNCH
13.45-15.45

Session 2: Violent Eating & Nourishing Care
Chair: Camelia Dewan, , Oslo/Uppsala University

Why People Care, and Why People Don’t Care about the Deep Sea
Robert Blaisak, Resilience Center, Stockholm University

Hungry Crabs: More-Than-Human Mobility in the Strait of Sicily
Emma Cyr, BIOrdinary, Stockholm University

Cruel Environmentalism and Invasivore Optimism: Eating Aliens in the Mediterranean as the Solution to Species Influx
Karin Ahlberg, BIOrdinary, Stockholm University

15.45-16.15 FIKA
16.15-17.30

Session 3: Oceanpolis & Ocean Policing
Chair: Bengt G. Karlsson, BIOrdinary, Stockholm University.

The Microbiopolitics of Keeping Lobsters Alive: Rethinking Water in Maine’s Lobster Industry
Jon Henrik Remme, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen

Oysteropolis - Exploring the Political in More Than Human Worlds
Ivana Macek, BIOrdinary, Stockholm University

17.30-18.00 Discussions and DRINKS