Oceanic imaginaries * Knowledge politics * Futures otherwise
Dr. Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa (Ria)
Welcome! I am an anthropologist, writer, and lecturer in environment and development at the University of Bonn’s Cluster of Excellence—the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, and an associate researcher at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).
Rooted in relational ethnography, my work explores how sea, land, memory, and ecological labour shape life across coastal and urban spaces in the Indian Ocean world and beyond.
I’m particularly drawn to how beings—sediments and spirits, plantlife and machines, animals, ancestors, and the elemental—inhabit, unsettle, and remake these zones of contact and displacement, especially in the wake of slow disasters and extractive development. Central to this interest is how knowledge inter/dependencies are produced and challenged—even if asymmetrically—across different lines of geoecological life.
These concerns also reflect my long-standing interest in the intersectional politics of presence, absence, and (un)belonging.
Having grown up between Abu Dhabi, Colombo, and Singapore, I’ve long been shaped by experiences of movement and impermanence—threads that continue to inform how I think and write. I trained in anthropology, literature, and theatre at NUS (Singapore), before moving into environmental geography and critical development studies at Oxford and Bonn. These varied foundations inform my work across maritime anthropology, cultural geography, and the environmental humanities.
Prior to joining the University of Bonn, I was a senior researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), while serving as a lecturer at the University of Bremen´s Anthropology Department between 2015 and 2023.
Over those years, I´ve collaboratively secured funding for and co-led several DFG, US SSRC, and Leibniz Association-supported research and artistic projects. These initiatives—including my past doctoral research—have spanned diverse topics: the fraught politics of coastal adaptation and infrastructural change across Java, Manila, and Singapore (2016-2020); fisher lifeworlds and the making of postwar seascapes in Sri Lanka´s northeast (2011-2015); conservation politics and the governance of marine invasive species in the Dutch Caribbean (2016-2018).
My recent project, BlueUrban (DFG, 2020–2023), examined the sociocultural and ecological impacts of land reclamation and sea-level rise in island Southeast Asia. The research critically engaged with the speculative imaginaries of “floating cities,” highlighting how such visions often obscure the uneven burdens of (mal)adaptation, particularly for coastal and historically marginalized collectives. A central thread of the project involved rethinking postcolonial entanglements between urban and oceanic expansion.
Outside my institutional role, I also work with students and early-career scholars through HARK/Humanizing Academia, a transnational peer-led mentoring initiative that fosters exchange on doing public-creative scholarship—within and beyond academia.
Meanwhile, I continue to contribute to policy and advocacy work (pro bono), having formerly held civil service and third sector positions in a number of organisations, including the Climate Secretariat (Bonn), the CGIAR-WorldFish Centre Headquarters (Penang), the Alola Foundation (Timor-Leste), Beyond Social Services, and the National Youth Council (Singapore).
This space serves as a gathering point. I welcome opportunities to connect and collaborate!
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.