Sustaining Seas: Oceanic Space and the Politics of Care

Why read Sustaining Seas? It is as simple as this: the seas sustain all life. This edited book emerges from conversations across several disciplines, and including practitioners of different specialities (artists, writers, planners, policy makers) about how to sustain the seas, as they sustain us. Sustaining Seas: Oceanic space and the politics of care aims to build a better understanding of what it means to care for aquatic places and their biocultural communities. The book is truly interdisciplinary and brings together a wide range of authors including, academics from diverse fields (architecture, science, cultural studies, law), artists, fisheries managers, and Indigenous Traditional Owners. It provides readers with new theoretical framings, as well as grounded case studies with a wide geographical and cultural breadth. This book assumes that understanding complexity, including social, cultural, ecological and economic interconnections, is crucial to any solution. Sustaining the seas is one of the most pressing global challenges for the planet and all her inhabitants. How to do justice to this challenge is an exigency for all scholars, and how to represent the oceans is a guiding theme in the book that is addressed by scholars, artists, and practitioners.

Table of Contents:
SECTION 1 - PRACTICES OF CARE 1.Oceanic Regime Shift / Lesley Green 2.“The sea is empty.” Fishers, migrants and a watery humanism / Elspeth Probyn 3.Speculative Harbouring at Blackwattle Bay: Interdisciplinary pedagogies and the politics of care / Kate Johnston; Susanne Pratt 4.Caring for Tuna of the Western Indian Ocean: Where the politics and ecology meet / Mialy Andriamahefazafy; Christian A. Kull; Pamima Leste; Patsy Theresine; Safina Echa SECTION 2 - FISH AS FOOD: CONSUMING AND SUSTAINING 5.The Multiple Meanings of Fish: Policy disconnections in Australian seafood Governance / Sonia Garcia Garcia; Kate Barclay; Rob Nicholls 6.What is a Fresh Fish? Knowledge and lived experience in the UK and Portugal / Monica Truninger; João Baptista; David M. Evans; Peter Jackson; Nádia Carvalho Nunes 7.Late Nights and Live Tanks: Entanglements of caring at Golden Century / Nancy Lee 8.Catfish: Halal, green or disgusting? Investigating practices of traditional farming and care in Indonesia / Arum Budiastu

About the Author :
Elspeth Probyn is Professor of gender and cultural studies, University of Sydney Kate Johnston is Postdoctoral Fellow with FoodLab Sydney at the Sydney Environment Institute. Nancy Lee works in research strategy and translation at the University of Sydney.

Review :
This vital volume describes a volume — the oceans — whose suffering sea-changes today require novel modes of governing, breathing, eating, timekeeping, building, and being. The book’s store of essays provides much needed equipment for re-orienting maritime and marine writing, thinking, and acting in these, our unsustainable times. Sustaining Seas is an interdisciplinary homage to the ocean. The collection shows that oceans not only deserve our care in the face of myriad threats such as overfishing and pollution, but they provide the possibility for care, as they sustain all life. About much more than crisis, this hopeful collection provides fresh perspective on our embodied relationships with the seas. Splashing widely through the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences, Sustaining Seas shows why the ocean needs to be at the heart of our thinking now. The overlapping and sometimes competing perspectives offered by landscape architecture, anthropology, literary criticism, environmental studies, the arts, and critical theory, among others, together produce an urgent diagnosis of the sickness in our blue planet, as well as practical and imaginative responses to it. Readers and thinkers in the blue humanities, marine sciences, and public policy will find much to value in this book. All of us who love the ocean should read it. The rich collection of case studies in Sustaining Seas engages with the different appeals of the marine. Truly interdisciplinary at heart it promotes dialogue across, and within, different disciplines, incorporating specialists of different fields (artists, writers, planners, policy makers) about how to support the seas. Through the twenty four chapters of the book the authors share a common aspiration to build a better understanding of what it means ‘to care for aquatic places and their biocultural communities’.