RG Power, Knowledge, and Servitude at Sea (POESIS)

Power, Knowledge, and Servitude at Sea (POESIS)

In cooperation with the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS)

2026–2032

The seas have long been, and remain, among the starkest sites of inequality on earth. They have been routes of enslavement, forced mobility, and escape. They are also where seafarers, fishers, other littoral communities, and the more than human lives entangled with theirs, live dispossession and erasure with particular intensity. Yet relations of power and dependency that shape watery worlds have largely been understood through land-based framings, despite a growing body of ocean-centered and hydrosocial thought.

Working across the blue humanities and the geohumanities, how might we explore submerged histories and imagined futures that emerge through connected seascapes, rivers and deltas? As a starting point, POESIS takes the ocean, and the worlds between land and water, as sites of political and epistemic struggle, and as contested archives both in motion and of movements. We are particularly interested in how uneven relational dependencies shift and mutate across fluid worlds, as they continue to be simultaneously contested in relation to their colonial pasts and planetary futures.

Walking the dike after the evictions, at the edge of Manila Bay, March 2017. © Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa

Why?

Our shared terrain is the intertidal, the mudflats, salt pans, mangrove belts and "sinking" urban shorelines that are neither entirely land nor sea. Here, the boundaries between land and water, labour and ecology, human and more-than-human life are continually unsettled or written over, making relational ecological dependencies particularly visible. How do race, gender, caste, class, empire, species and (dis)ability shape who or what is made indispensable? Whose bodies, knowledges and ways of being are made to sustain worlds on which others depend, and who or what bear the costs? And when those worlds erode, whose accounts and lived experience are recognised as legitimate, and by whose authority? These questions enable us to think about the relations of knowledge and labour together.

What?

Conceptually, POESIS draws on vernacular and disciplinary theories around servitude, epistemic dependency, care, extractivism and inhabitability. These are brought into conversation with the group’s collective backgrounds in environmental anthropology, modern history, marine ecology, knowledge sociology, postcolonial thought, and science and technology studies, together with feminist and multispecies scholarship.

Our current geographic focus rests on diverse postcolonial "Asias", putting Gujarat and the Arabian Sea in conversation with the wider Asia-Pacific littoral, comprising of Penang, Hong Kong, Singapore, northern Java, Manila and Colombo. In going beyond national and regional framings of the Asia- Pacific, we hope to also contribute to evolving debates in Indian Ocean scholarship, and to broader perspectives on the making of Afro-Asian and inter-Asian oceanic ties, identities, and solidarities.

In charting contemporary relational dependencies that emerge from various developmentalist agendas, we are equally keen on "following" routes and relations through which labouring, knowledge extraction and ecological change connect these worlds, while paying as much attention to the frictions that emerge along the way.

How?

Methodologically, we work across participatory ethnography and archival research, oral history, visual and sensory methods, and arts-based practice. Our research centers on three empirical settings in which forced relational dependencies have persisted, through extractivism, invisibilisation, and the making of inhabitability.

POESIS primarily contributes to BCDSS Research Area A: Transitions and Transformations, alongside other RAs in which its members are embedded. At IDOS, the project works across the Departments of Environmental Governance, and Knowledge Cooperation and Training.

Over the next four years, POESIS members will be working across two doctoral studies and a habilitation project, journal publications, an edited volume, a digital oral history archive, and a public visual exhibition. More multimodal content will follow on our project website https://www.poesisresearch.org.