Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean

Critical human activities take place at sea, including trade, tourism, migration, scientific exploration and resource exploitation. This book offers a novel and important contribution to an ever-emerging cross-disciplinary subject matter and challenges human geography's preoccupation with the terrestrial. Linking to new theoretical debates shaping the geographic discipline, (such as affect, assemblage, emotion, hybridity and the more-than-human) this volume unlocks new knowledge concerning the human geographies of ocean space and dispenses with fixed conceptions of space. It advances geographical understanding based on the world as 'becoming', changing, mobile and processional.

Contents: Foreword: on thalassography; Introduction: 'A perfect and absolute blank': human geographies of the ocean, Jon Anderson and Kimberley Peters. Part I Ocean Knowledges: Understanding the Water World: Mediterranean metaphors: travel, translation, and oceanic imaginaries in the 'new Mediterraneans' of the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, Philip E. Steinberg; 'Plenty of weeds and penguins': charting ocean knowledge, Anne-Flore Laloë; Geographies of coral reef conservation: global trends and environmental constructions, Bÿrbel G. Bischof; Merging with the medium? Knowing the place of the surfed wave, Jon Anderson. Part II Ocean Experiences: Embodied Performances, Practices and Emotions: The day we drove on the ocean (and lived to tell the tale about it): of deltas, ice roads, waterscapes and other meshworks, Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart; What I talk about when I talk about kayaking, Jon Anderson; Deep ethnography: witnessing the ghosts of SS Thistlegorm, Stephanie Merchant. Part III Ocean Natures: Mobilities and More-Than-Human Concerns: Sustaining livelihoods: mobility and governance in the Senegalese Atlantic, Juliette Hallaire and Deirdre McKay; Governance of the seas: a more-than-human perspective on the Cardigan Bay scallop fishery, Christopher Bear; 'With perfect regularity throughout'; more-than-human geographies of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, Anyaa Anim-Addo; Taking more-than-human geographies to sea: ocean natures and offshore radio piracy, Kimberley Peters. Index.