Roundtable Title: “Oceanic-Graphic Speculative Grammars: Unlearning Marine Narratives”

Panel Organisers: Alejandro Limpo González, Renée Hoogland and Dr Giulia Champion
(University of Southampton)

Panel Chair: Dr Giulia Champion (University of Southampton)

Speakers:
Dr Prema Arasu (University of Western Australia)
Tomas Buitendijk (University College Dublin)
Alejandro Limpo González (University of Southampton)
Renée Hoogland (University of Southampton)
Aster Hoving (University of Stavanger)
Julia Jung (German Marine Research Alliance)
Mia Strand (Nelson Mandela University)
Dr J. R. Carpenter (University of Southampton)

Roundtable Description:
In this roundtable, speakers will intervene for 5-10 minutes on the topics mentioned below before the
discussion is open to the audience, who will be invited to participate in a broader conversation. In this
roundtable we are interested in opening up environmental materials to a discussion on imaginations,
speculative grammar and media. How do maps in cartography, risk assessment, weather forecasting,
and other genres of prediction have shaped ocean knowledges and materialities? And how do
these speculative grammars shape oceanic “matter” – extra-human life, environmental data, and
ecologies – across extractive economies, cultural imaginations, and sciences? Playing in the second
morpheme of the words “cartography” and “oceanography”, this roundtable asks what it means to
write the oceans, what narratives, cultural or technological, are told? Who gets to tell ocean
narratives and whose voices are erased or marginalised in these OceanicGraphic Speculative
Grammars? Finally, the roundtable organisers would like to note that most of the participants of this
roundtable do not claim that the discussions and contributions that will take place are by no means an
exhaustive representations of the many narratives of and relations to the ocean that continue to be
silenced in many context of structural and systemic inequalities.

Participants:
Alejandro Limpo González (University of Southampton)
Bio: Alejandro is a Leverhulme-funded PhD researcher at the University of Southampton. He is part
of “Intelligent Oceans”, an interdisciplinary research programme based at the Southampton Marine
and Maritime Institute (SMMI). He studied Anthropology at the National University of Cordoba
(Argentina) and the University Institute of Lisbon (Portugal). For his current research, he is
conducting ethnographic fieldwork among scientists and engineers at scientific and governmental
institutions. His Ph.d project looks at networked images, online platforms, machine vision and
artificial intelligence as key elements through which the ocean becomes a visual space in
contemporary science and environmental governance.

Contribution: Contemporary “oceano-graphy” has become a matter of graphikós (as belonging to

drawing or writing) in a rather fundamental way. While networked images are the standard model
for environmental knowledge, major environmental discursive apparatuses described the ocean as
low-resolution, frictional, slow, and even poor. What do these techno-scientific ideals of total
transparency, immediate access and mastery of ocean matter and/as images tell us about ongoing
reorganizations of environments and media? I will engage in a critical examination of ocean
images in the computationally-driven knowledge economies of oceanography.

Renée Hoogland (University of Southampton)

Bio: Renée Hoogland (she/her) is a Leverhulme-funded PhD researcher at the University of
Southampton. She is part of “Intelligent Oceans”, an interdisciplinary research programme based at
the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute (SMMI). Based in the English department, her
project explores how the genre of speculation is put to use across media, infrastructure, and
communication that detail the intimate tension between ecology and economy in the North Sea region.
Next to her PhD studies, Renée is on the editorial board of Frame: Journal of Literary Studies and
she guides speculative walking tours on the mudflats of the Wadden Sea.

Contribution: In making sense of ocean ecology, the visceral encounters with both its expressive
alterity and its familiar traces of human involvement happen all at once and call for a speculative
grammar. This speculative grammar, I suggest, marks the necessary distinction between knowing an
object and sensing an ecology. This roundtable intervention therefore discusses the narratological
implications of different forms of oceanic mapping: what does a speculative grammar look like across
maps that are animated by the intimate tension between global economy and ocean ecology?

Mia Strand (Nelson Mandela University)

Bio: Mia Strand (she/her) is an early career researcher with the Institute for Coastal and Marine
Research (CMR) at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, and the One Ocean Hub. Her current
research centres around knowledge co-production using arts-based participatory research methods for
more inclusive and equitable ocean management processes. Her work also explores marine cultural
heritage and children’s rights to a healthy ocean.

Contribution: Marine science is often presented and conceptualised as this non-human, positivistic,
unbiased, didactic, objective, natural sciences. But how can we even begin to understand and co-exist
with marine systems without thinking through social-ecological systems, and more specifically
understanding people’s cultural connections to the ocean and coast? This intervention discusses the
missing subjective, experiential, sociocultural aspects of marine sciences, and possible pathways to
better recognise these in the future.

Julia Jung (German Marine Research Alliance)

Bio: Julia Jung (dey/dem/deirs) has a background in marine biology, participatory methodologies and
community-based environmental management. Currently, deir are the project coordinator for the
“interactive world ocean”, a project of the German Marine Research Alliance that is creating an
interactive map of the Ocean for schools and museums.

Contribution: When showcasing the Ocean on maps or in media, this is often driven by a practical
need, our visualisations as a tool, yet, the way we shape the tool also reflects and shapes our world. In
a world driven by urgency, how can we keep our values, their political nature and other intangible
things, like beauty, close, when engaging with oceanographic materials to help us navigate our world.

Tomas Buitendijk (University College Dublin)

Bio: Dr Tomas Buitendijk (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the iCRAG SFI Research
Centre in Applied Geosciences and the School of Earth Sciences, University College Dublin. He has a
background in the Blue and Environmental Humanities, and is currently involved with the Taking
Stock project, on the public perception and acceptance of marine sediments storing carbon. 

Contribution: For Taking Stock, we are carrying out an empirical study on coastal community
perceptions of offshore space and marine sediments storing carbon. As many coastal residents may
not have interacted with these phenomena directly, we are using a speculative realist framework to
elicit perceptions that are potentially imagination-driven. Meanwhile, we expect these perceptions to
play a material role in current social and economic use(s) of the marine environment. They will also
be of key importance in forthcoming discussions on marine spatial planning generated by the need to
preserve offshore carbon stocks. 

Prema Arasu (University of Western Australia)

Bio: Dr Prema Arasu (they/she) is a postdoctoral research fellow in environmental humanities at the
Deep-Sea Research Centre at the University of Western Australia, where they work with a seagoing
team of scientists. Prema’s research draws upon multispecies ethnographies and material feminisms to
investigate the representation of the deep sea in the cultural imagination.

Contribution: A paper in progress drawing on Steinberg & Peters discussion about wet ontologies
which challenges the geographical construction of the ocean as either a flat/empty space, which
limits thinking about its depths and dynamism.

Aster Hoving (University of Stavanger)

Bio: Aster Hoving is a PhD fellow in Environmental Humanities at the Greenhouse at the University
of Stavanger. Her PhD project “Ocean Energies” explores the rhythms of and around the tides, waves,
upwelling, and hydrothermal vents by investigating how scientists, companies, and artists engage with
the energies of the ocean.

Contribution: This contribution addresses how the ephemeral nature of waves is mediated in
ecological and technological objects, particularly seashells and wave energy converters. In climate
science, the aesthetics of shell growth rings, which are often sourced from museum collections,
become statistics. Wave energy infrastructures similarly harness the momentary energy of waves into
electricity that can be stored and transported. As such, these mediations function as a permanent
repository of temporary environmental phenomena to be extracted for knowledge and energy. The
wager of my project is that if shells and energy converters are both wave mediators, and if climate
science draws on aesthetic and historical materials, then artistic research and practice can help us
examine and expand the conventional tools of environmental research and governance. The question I
ask myself is this: can creative-critical research methods help us document waves without turning
them into permanent repositories? 

Dr J. R. Carpenter (University of Southampton)

Bio: Dr J. R. Carpenter (she/they) has a background in Visual Art, Digital Literature, and Media
Archaeology. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on the AHRC & DFG funded,
interdisciplinary research project Weather Reports – Wind as Model, Media, and Experience at
Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
 
Contribution: Wind is invisible; it can only be perceived indirectly, through proxy. This motivates a
turn to instruments, measurement, calculation, abstraction, and modelling. Drawing on archival
research, I will discuss colonial affect in hydrographic images created during wind-powered voyages
for scientific discovery during the age of sail, querying how this affect continues to resonate in the
Blue Humanities.