Tracing the ebbs and flows of being and ecological belonging...
Rapti (Ria) Siriwardane-de Zoysa, PhD
Welcome. I am an environmental ethnographer trained at NUS, Oxford, and Bonn. My work moves between critical ocean studies, postcolonial praxis, and development anthropology, with a focus on how precarity and (be)longing are lived and reimagined across human and more-than-human lifeworlds in the Indian Ocean world.
I currently serve as a Senior Researcher at the German Institute for Development and Sustainability (IDOS) and a member of the Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), University of Bonn, where I lead the cross-institutional group POESIS: Power, Knowledge, and Servitude at Sea.
Over the past two decades, I have worked on the coloniality of ecological knowledge and the cultural politics of coastal (mal)adaptation—probing how land subsidence, reclamation, and speculative “floating cities” shape worlds marked by conflict and disaster. More recently, I´ve returned to relational inquiries, with a focus on spectral afterlives within maritime shipping, and interspecies socialities that influence biocultural heritage-making.
My collaborations have taken me through Java, Manila, Penang, northeastern Sri Lanka, Singapore, Timor-Leste, Bonaire, and Jamaica, spanning both long-form ethnography and arts-based practice.
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.