Tracing the ebbs and flows of being and ecological belonging...
Dr. Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa (Ria)
Welcome!
Raised between Abu Dhabi, Colombo, and Singapore, I’ve always been drawn to the spaces in-between. This sense of drift and crossing continues to shape how I approach my work as a writer, anthropologist, and lecturer exploring cultural ecologies in the Indian Ocean world and the Asia-Pacific. I am particularly interested in how logics of empire and development continue to shape coastal and urban frontiers, while bringing together questions of identity, belonging, and ecological care. These inquiries guide my work across four thematic areas: intertidal lifeworlds, epistemic justice, multispecies labour, and speculative infrastructures.
I was trained in literature, anthropology, cultural geography, and theatre studies at NUS, Oxford, and Bonn. I hold a joint appointment at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), where I co-ordinate the partnership programme. I also serve on the editorial boards of Ocean and Society and the Springer series Marine Social and Cultural Studies.
Meanwhile, I´m completing my habilitation project, Haunting the Developmental Sea, based on seven years of ethnographic research in the Indo-Malay-Philippine archipelago. This work explores the interplay of epistemic and infrastructural dependencies in semi-submerged landscapes, focusing on the agency of ghostly afterlives in the wake of littoral extraction, overbuilding, and abandonment.
Previously based at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), I taught anthropology and sociology at the University of Bremen (2015-2023). During this time, I co-led DFG, US SSRC and Leibniz-funded projects with collaborators across the Dutch Caribbean, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.
My most recent project, BlueUrban (2020–2023), examined how land reclamation, seawalls, and urban adaptation transform social relations between cities and seas in the Indo-Malay archipelago. We explored modernist visions of floating futures and their contested meanings for coastal communities, alongside the politics of oceanic privatization and waterfront development.
Beyond academia, I’ve worked with organizations including the Climate Secretariat (Bonn), CGIAR-WorldFish Centre (Penang), the Alola Foundation (Timor-Leste), and Singapore’s National Youth Council.
This space serves as a gathering point. I welcome opportunities to connect and collaborate!
Recently published & forthcoming
Journal of Maritime Studies (2025).
Sites: Northern Jakarta, Indonesia
Coastal reclamation in North Jakarta unsettles colonial, terracentric, and anthropocentric notions of property. This piece contrasts elite geoengineering with small-scale kampung shoreline extensions of shell and rubble, revealing “distanced dispossession” beyond state-private divides. Centering more-than-human infrastructures on building-with, it complicates dominant narratives of land, belonging, and exclusion in Jakarta, and what is often framed as a sinking urban landscape.
Keywords: Coastal urbanization; artificial islands; more-than-human relations; dispossession; private property; Java
Access here
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, we reveal how policymakers struggle to address their own terracentric 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.