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, are cared for, or are remade into something else entirely.
I am an environmental ethnographer with a writer´s itch, working across littoral and urban worlds of the Indian Ocean and beyond. My work traces how desire, alienation, and belonging are renegotiated amid conflict and post-disaster seascapes, contestations over heritage and infrastructure, and speculative visions of what coasts might hold or become — submerging cities amid disaster-framed eviction, artificial islands, floating futures, the ghostly afterlives of container ships. Labouring relations, human and other-than-human, run through all of it.
Over the past two decades, I have been learning from communities and collaborators across central Java, Manila, Penang, northeastern Sri Lanka, Singapore, Timor-Leste, Bonaire, and Jamaica, moving between long-term ethnographic research and arts-based forms of narration. I created Ink + Ethos as a co-learning space for experimental storytelling and in rediscovering the joy of writing.
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 University of Bonn’s Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), where I lead a small research group POESIS: Power, Knowledge, and Servitude at Sea.
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. Click here for more.
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.