Episode description

Oceans as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering

Rather than concentrating only on how oceans are formally framed or regulated as objects of international legal ordering, this episode foregrounds the patterns and imaginaries of global dis/ordering that thinking through the ocean reveal. Which material historical conditions have shaped the current legal constitution of oceanic space? Which new legal and political temporalities, geographies, and subjectivities might ‘thinking oceanically’ generate? How are international law and the ocean co-constituted – through its specific spatial zones, its depths and bottoms, its vexing vents, and amphibious legalities? Which critical practices can enable us to think and act in unruly oceans – through its waves, marine mammals, and blue legalities – as the ever-shifting terrain of violence, struggle, and political imagination?

Convened by Marie Petersmann (LSE) and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche (QMUL).

The Speakers:

Surabhi Ranganathan is Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. Her work on the law of the sea, its biodiversity within and beyond national jurisdiction, and the techno-utopian imaginaries that today drive the licensing of mining activities in the deep seabed, offers insights into the ordering and disordering of the ocean, its colonial history, and political economy.

Renisa Mawani is Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories, Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, and currently Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London School of Law. Her work on ‘oceans as method’, the imperial history of the jurisdiction of the sea, the legal personification of slave ships and legal objectification of slaves raises important and urgent questions about ocean ontologies and ecologies.

Event Resources:

• Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘The Law of the Sea’
• Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘Decolonization and International Law: Putting the Ocean on the Map’.
• Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘Ocean Floor Grab: International Law and the Making of an Extractive Imaginary’.
• Renisa Mawani, ‘The Law of the Sea: Oceans, Ships, and the Anthropocene’, in The Routledge Handbook of Law and the Anthropocene.
• Renisa Mawani, ‘The Ship, The Slave, the Legal Person’ (2022) 87 Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 19-42
• Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire.

Additional Resources:

• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! As told to the author by Setay Adamu Boateng.
• Ranjit Hoskote, Jonahwhale.
• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.
• Lee Maracle, ‘Whale Watching, Salish Style’.
• Stefan Helmreich, A Book of Waves.
• Elizabeth Deloughrey, ‘Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene’.
• Astrida Neimanis, ‘The Weather Underwater: Blackness, White Feminism, and the Breathless Sea’.
• Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘The Complicating Sea: The Indian Ocean as Method’.
• Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness.

Collections:

• The Dial, Issue 4: Shipwrecks (2023)
• Christen A. Smith et al. (eds), The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento
• Irus Braverman (ed.), Laws of the Sea – Interdisciplinary Currents, including Surabhi Ranganathan's ‘The Vexed Liminality of Hydrothermal Vents: An Opportunity to Unmake the Law of the Sea’
• Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson (eds.), Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea.
• David Armitage, Alison Bashford, Sujit Sivasundaram (eds.), Oceanic Histories.

Reportage:

• The Southern Collective, Occupation of the coast – Blue economy in India
• Mongabay India
• Deep Sea Conservation Coalition
• Marie Tharp, Mapping the Ocean Floor

Listening:

• The Deep Sea Podcast

Watching:

• Deep Rising (2023)

Fiction:

• Frank Schatzing, The Swarm (2007)
• Martin McInness, In Ascension (2023)

Sound / artwork by Tobias and Dominique Koch