Tracing the ebbs and flows of terraqueous entanglements
Dr. Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa
Welcome! I’m an environmental ethnographer, writer, and lecturer affiliated with the University of Bonn’s BCDSS Cluster of Excellence and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).
Having grown up in the port cities of Abu Dhabi, Colombo, and Singapore, I’ve always carried a transcultural approach to storytelling into my academic and artistic work. I studied Southeast Asian anthropology, theatre, and Anglophone literature at NUS (Singapore), before moving into environmental geography and critical development studies at Oxford and Bonn.
My research largely focuses on South and Southeast Asia and their broader transoceanic entanglements. I examine how landscapes shaped by water and the lithic—coastal, estuarine, and amphibious worlds—are lived, remembered, and transformed through movement, extraction, repair, and regeneration. I am also drawn to the spectral traces of disrupted ecologies, exploring how histories and futures of ruination, displacement, and speculative infrastructural development persist in the materialities of place and everyday life.
Prior to joining the University of Bonn, I was a senior researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), while serving as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Bremen´s Anthropology Department.
Over the past decade, I’ve been involved in transregional collaborations while co-leading DFG and SSRC funded scientific and digital artistic projects. These initiatives—including my past doctoral research—have explored diverse, interrelated topics: the politics of coastal adaptation, land reclamation and floating urban design in the Indo-Malay-Philippine archipelago (2017-2023); fisher lifeworlds and the making of postwar seascapes in Sri Lanka´s northeast (2011-2015); the governance of marine invasive species in the Dutch Antilles (2018), among others.
I also work with students and early-career scholars through Humanizing Academia, a co-founded peer-led mentoring initiative that fosters practice-based exchange on being, thinking, and doing public scholarship—within and beyond academia.
Meanwhile, I have worked across policy research and advocacy in various capacities, holding roles at the Climate Secretariat in Bonn, the CGIAR-WorldFish Centre in Penang, the Alola Foundation in Dili, Timor Leste, together with Beyond Social Services and the National Youth Council in Singapore.
This space serves as a gathering point —an evolving archive of ideas. I welcome opportunities to connect and collaborate across re/search, community work, and storytelling.
Upcoming
Afterlives of reclamation: Coastal privatisation, distanced dispossession, and more-than-human calcifications in Jakarta Bay
Article in press, Journal of Maritime Studies
(2025).
Sites: Northern Jakarta, Indonesia
Coastal reclamation in North Jakarta unsettles colonial and anthropocentric notions of property. This piece contrasts elite geoengineering with subaltern kampung shoreline extensions, revealing “distanced dispossession” beyond state-private divides. Centering more-than-human infrastructures, it complicates dominant narratives of land, belonging, and exclusion in Jakarta’s sinking urban landscape.
Keywords: Coastal urbanization; artificial islands; more-than-human relations; dispossession; private property; Java
Buoyant Life: Floating Urbanities Adrift in the Archipelagic Imaginary
Forthcoming journal article in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society Journal (2025), with Cahya Gemilang.
Sites: Semarang, Banjarmasin (South Kalimantan), Bandung & the Flores Archipelago, Indonesia
Against ecologically modernist visions of floating cities as climate adaptation, this work critiques technopolitical dreams of building with/on water in submerging coastal landscapes. Exploring buoyancy as both metaphor and method, it examines the urban-amphibious entanglements of archipelagic Southeast Asia. By tracing exclusionary municipal placemaking and the tensions between floating futures and amphibious pasts, it reveals how policymakers remain bound by terra-centric planning biases.
Keywords: Floating cities; global infrastructure; coastal climate adaptation; speculative futures; amphibious architecture and design; urban experimentation; Indonesia
Remembering the Ways of Itinerant Sediments in Javanese Pantura
Forthcoming book chapter, with Cahya Gemilang. Site: Pekalongan, north Java.
This chapter explores themes around loss, abandonment, and resistance as felt during moments of deep solastalgia in relation to rapidly subsiding coastal landscapes in northern Java. Starting with contested realities around protective coastal infrastructure and their afterlives in/of ruination, we trace how disappearing coastal sediments, particularly in relation to the arrivals of littoral spirit beings and other forms of ecological haunting, are being storied in the seemingly abandoned settlement of Pekalongan’s Simonet.
Keywords: Submergence; sediment; solastalgia; coastal infrastructure; spectral ecologies
Why Tidescapes?
There goes a river, heaving an ocean behind it… Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207-1273)
Intertidal zones are shapeshifting milieus, characterised by diverse rhythms, flows and temporal registers. They are home to hybrid ecologies of animal, vegetal, and geological life as marine, riverine, brackish and groundwaters mingle and circulate.
Historically, tidal spaces have served as diverse frontiers in human and more-than-human histories: as territories to be fought for and fought over, as conduits of/for cultural exchange, and as dis/connected worlds of colonial and imperial encounter, enslavement, and resource extraction.
Climate-induced changes across water, land, the atmospheric, and the subterranean are more acutely experienced in such spaces. In the so called ´global south´ intertidal spaces have often historically been home to marginalised communities, whether it be the vast floodplains and mangrove forests of the deltaic Sunderbans, or the rapidly subsiding urban fabric of northern and western Java.
Metaphorically, tidescapes are interstices through which lively theorisations about hybrid matter and practices at placemaking unfold. Freshwater salinisation, land subsidence, liquefaction and other cascading processes warrant new pathways of ingenuity and for re-imagining radically different approaches towards multispecies dwelling.
Materially, tidescapes also present living archives. They offer to be read as vital, multi-layered geoecologies for tracing the ebbs and flows of vastly different kinds of tides – of circulating ideas, social practices and collective memory. The boundaries and edges of everyday terra-aqueous existence are constantly remade.
As Alan Watts once reflected on the image of a gull persistently tapping at its prey: “the shell of the crab, the clam, the mussel is the boundary of its universe.” For a deeper exploration, listen to Watts’ Love of Waters.