Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    Ocean activism: understanding political acts in extra-national terrain
    From enslaved people capturing vessels during the Middle Passage to Greenpeace’s and Sea Shepherd’s famous anti-whaling campaigns in the latter half of the twentieth century – resistance at sea is a phenomenon that is as old as human seafaring. Yet, while social movement scholars have a long-standing interest in transnational movements and what it means to act politically beyond the borders of nation-states, much less is known about social movements acting outside of national territory, in the international waters of the planetary ocean. This article addresses this gap by bringing the phenomenon of sea-oriented civil society to the attention of social movement scholars and proposing a conceptual framework for understanding ocean activism. Bringing together currently scattered accounts of maritime movements with relevant literature from the recent ocean turn across the social and political sciences, the article argues that we may understand ocean activism along three defining, sea-specific characteristics: (1) material specificity (due to the sea’s elemental qualities), (2) technological dependency (from ships to AIS), and (3) extra-territoriality (outside national jurisdiction). The paper contributes to discussions of transnational social movements in particular, demonstrating that scholarly attention to the ocean enables new perspectives on their spatial politics, media and data practices, and materiality. Thus, addressing social movement scholarship’s terrestrial bias does not only allow us to begin to conceptualize ocean activism but opens up paths to better understand political acts in extra-national terrains, in and beyond the sea.
  • Publication
    Contested knowledges: Negotiating the epistemic politics of engaged activist ethnography
    This article offers a methodological reflection on what it means to practise politically engaged ethnography with contemporary alter-European activists. While politically engaged research has a long history in the social sciences, it continues to present methodological and epistemological challenges to ethnographers who want their work not only to be academically rigorous, but also politically relevant. In this article, I build on scholarship conducted in collaboration with activists and social movements and what has come to be known as ‘militant ethnography’ in particular. Reflecting on three years of fieldwork with alter-European activists conducted between the UK’s vote to leave the EU in 2016 and the European Parliament elections in 2019, this article suggests that engaged knowledge production, here, is as an ongoing process of contestation. The article introduces four conceptual pillars along which these epistemic politics may be negotiated, understanding the knowledges produced as contextual, corporeal, contradictory and collective.
  • Publication
    Ocean Justice: Rethinking Global Justice from the Sea
    ( 2023)
    Chris Armstrong
    ;
    Discussions of global justice urgently need to include the question of the sea, and to foreground the concept of ocean justice. The ocean is discussed here as a site from which to address planetary environmental destruction, issues of global inequality and racialised violence - but also as a political laboratory from which radical alternatives to the current global order may emerge. Discussion focuses on the Blue New Deal; Blue Acceleration - the current, largely unregulated, push for growth from ocean-based industries including fossil fuel extraction, the exploitation of marine genetic resources, and industrial fishing; maritime migration and the racialised sea; the lack of regulation of the high seas; the possibilities this creates for radical sea alternatives-for reimagining the sea and ocean justice from the perspective of maritime civil society. Through a New Blue Deal, the ocean can be a starting point for addressing both the global ecological crisis and issues of global injustice.