Tracing the ebbs and flows of being and ecological belonging...
Maritime worlds often spill beyond the shore, shaping everyday life and imagination in ways that go unseen. I am drawn to what happens when those multispecies waters rise, recede, are toxified, cared for, abandoned or remade into something else entirely.
I am an ethnographer with a writer’s itch. My work broadly intersects the environmental humanities, critical ocean studies, and decolonial praxis. I am interested in how colonial legacies and developmentalist interventions shape coastal futures in the Indian Ocean world and beyond. Over the past decade, I have followed this question through postwar and post-disaster seascapes, submerging cities and the dyanmics of disaster-framed eviction, speculative visions of artificial islands and floating futures, and, more recently, the spectral afterlives of container shipping. Running through all of it are labouring relations and diverse forms of invisibalised servitude, both human and more-than-human, in holding edges together.
Much of what I share here has been learnt alongside communities and collaborators across Central Java, Manila, Penang, northeastern Sri Lanka, Singapore, Timor-Leste, Bonaire and Jamaica, through work that moves between long-term ethnographic research and arts-based forms of narration. That practice led me to create Ink + Ethos, a co-learning space for rediscovering the joy of writing and experimental storying.
I was trained across anthropology, literature, theatre, geography and development studies at NUS, Oxford and Bonn. I am based at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) and the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), University of Bonn, where I lead POESIS: Power, Knowledge and Servitude at Sea, a small cross-institutional research group. I also serve as Associate Editor for Maritime Studies and on the editorial boards of Ocean and Society and the Springer series Marine Social Sciences and the Blue Humanities. More about my work and background.
Recently published
On Southern Anthropocenes (2025), ed, Casper Bruun Jensen – What happens if Southern Anthropocenes are allowed to multiply, and room is made for practices of worlding and life that are impossible from within the singular Anthropocene? This wide-ranging volume addresses the changing landscape of problems, challenges, and possibilities that emerge once the macroscopic notion of the Anthropocene is replaced with Southern Anthropocenes. It envisions Southern Anthropocenes as an opening towards forms and ends of life that exceed—while remaining in partial relation with—modern socio-economic horizons and the determinations of the geo-, eco-, and climate sciences.
Book Chapter
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. (2025). “Tropical Cargoscapes: Sojourning Putridities in the Afterlives of Medical Necrowaste“, in Jensen, C.B. (Ed.), Southern Anthropocenes. London: Routledge.
Credits: Annisa Ananda Sari, Rumah Lanting abode on the Martapura River, Banjarmasin, September 2023
Journal article
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. & Gemilang, M. S.C. (2025) “Buoyant Life: Floating Urbanities Adrift in the Archipelagic Imaginary“. Engaging Science. Technology & Society, Vol. 11, No. 2.
Critiquing the globalist, technopolitical wet dreams of floating cities, we use buoyancy as method and metaphor with which to trace urban-amphibious projects in archipelagic Indonesia.
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 groundwater 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 atmosphere, 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 placemaking practices unfold. Freshwater salinisation, land subsidence, liquefaction, and other cascading processes warrant new pathways of ingenuity and the reimagining of radically different approaches to 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.