Ocean desires, ocean diversities

In a time when seeking new ways of inhabiting and managing a precarious and troubled world has become increasingly critical, the ocean has emerged as a harbinger of both problems and solutions, fears and dreams. Sea level rise, global warming, acidification and marine resource depletion challenge people’s ways of living with and off the ocean. Meanwhile, the ocean surface and its deeper abysses emerge as new resource frontiers through offshore wind development and deep-sea mining. 

The world’s only ocean has thus become an interconnected, three-dimensional place of desire and contestation, comprising a diversity of not always mutually compatible promises, hopes, and worries. While complex ocean-focused problems and conflicts have also characterised many earlier epochs of the world’s human and environmental history, the scale and diversity of the present time, often labelled the Anthropocene, appear to be without precedents.

Aiming to address the global diversities of ocean desires, this interdisciplinary course looks at a variety of case studies from the Arctic to the Global South, showing how a variety of exogenous and endogenous ocean expectations collide and unfold in local communities worldwide, as well as on multilateral diplomatic stages including the United Nations and the International Seabed Authority. 

While the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), long assumed to be the bedrock of global ocean governance, is challenged by resource grabbing and unregulated extraction, new instruments such as the recent Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction, emerge with a potential to fill governance gaps. Meanwhile, local coastal and island communities continue experience the ravages of climate change and illegal fishing, to name but two dimensions of precarity.