Events

Please note that this seminar will be presented via Skype (an online platform).

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Connor Graham, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Virtually every coast on the planet has experienced harmful algal blooms (HABs), or the overgrowth of phytoplankton that generate toxic or anoxic (oxygen-deprived) conditions for other aquatic organisms. While these overgrowths have occurred as part of seasonal phytoplankton ecology throughout recorded history, areas that have never been afflicted by blooms are suddenly grappling with the dangerous abundance of cosmopolitan phytoplankton. In most places, the management of toxic algal blooms is largely approached as technical problems of economic growth, whose resolution lies in technocratic solutions: better ballast water management, early detection through ecological modeling, ‘best practices’ for agri- and aquaculture discharge, and improving sewage treatment systems. This is especially true for the city-state of Singapore, where HABs research is a domain of technocratic experts, from state bureaucrats to natural scientists, many of whom have made important, and certainly much needed, contributions to improving water management. However, some of these very same experts suggest that it has been technical solutions for economic growth and sustainability that have generated the conditions favourable for harmful algal blooms to begin with. Further, the material-semiotic premises of HABs research also fail to account for the webs of relations that have long sustained the distinct and related worlds of fishing, fish farming, and indigenous communities in the Johor Straits itself. In this paper, I share stories from the Johor Straits, highlighting the colonial and industrial infrastructures that have made it a favourable habitat for some cosmopolitan beings, but increasingly unlivable for others. In doing so, I explore the question of how local assemblies of humans and nonhumans shape, and are shaped by, global environmental phenomena like harmful algal blooms. Further, I examine how reasonable but exclusionary forms of politics are challenged and sustained in the construction of technical solutions to environmental problems. Rather than a negation of science, or a reinscription of its hegemony, I offer moments of openings—of emergent practical opportunities to develop “unreasonable”, cosmopolitical spaces that promote distinct worlds and lifeways as integral to collaborative survival.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Zahirah Suhaimi is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she specializes in the fields of environmental and political anthropology, and feminist science and technology studies. Her work is dedicated to supporting conversations between the natural and humanistic sciences, to tackle fraught issues of landscape degradation and survival within collaborative frameworks of environmental justice. Currently, Zahirah is researching the threat of globalizing organisms as more than simply a concatenation of modern travel, but also of colonial and industrial processes, namely: economic intensification, political consolidation, and social marginalization of humans and nonhumans.

REGISTRATION

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