I grew up between Abu Dhabi, Colombo, and Singapore, and that sense of drift continues to shape my writing and teaching on maritime cultural ecologies of the Indian Ocean world and beyond. I hold a PhD in Development Anthropology (Bonn) and an MSc in Environmental Geography (Oxford), with earlier training in sociology, Anglophone literature, and theatre studies at the National University of Singapore.
I am drawn to the felt, more-than-human relations that shape everyday life on coasts and in cities, and to how resistance to colonial and developmental agendas continues to animate it
These concerns converge around four interrelated areas: intertidal worlds, epistemic dependencies (extraction & erasure), interspecies sociality, and sacred and spectral ecologies. Methodologically, I draw on multimodal ethnographic approaches, including audiovisual practice, oral history, and folklore-based methods, with grounded theory informing my analysis.
Affiliation: IDOS & BCDSS, University of Bonn (Group Lead, POESIS: Power, Knowledge and Servitude at Sea).
Dr. Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa (Ria)
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 intersecting logics of empire and development continue to shape coastal and urban frontiers—and how precarity itself is imagined, disavowed, and differently valued across these spaces. In continually asking whose knowledge counts in defining environmental crisis and why, these inquiries guide my research across four thematic areas: intertidal worlds, epistemic justice, multispecies relations, and speculative infrastructures.
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 coordinate the partnership programme and co-lead the research group POESIS (“Power, Equity, and Epistemic Dependencies in Oceanic Spaces”). I also serve on the editorial boards of a new Springer book series Marine Social Sciences and the Blue Humanities, together with the journals Ocean and Society and Maritime Studies.
I’m presently 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 ghostly afterlives in the wake of littoral extraction, overbuilding, and abandonment.
Current work
My field-based collaborations across the Indo–Malay–Philippine archipelago and Sri Lanka have explored urban struggles shaped by wartime and post-disaster eviction, land subsidence, coastal reclamation, and the speculative politics of floating cities, while foregrounding how littoral collectives improvise and rework everyday life.
I am currently completing my habilitation grounded in seven years of ethnography across island South and Southeast Asia. The project interrogates the interplay of epistemic and infrastructural dependence within the semi-submerged, littoral landscapes of Java, Metro Manila, and Colombo. It follows a cast of sojourning agents—coastal dwellers and restless ancestors, mangroves and milkfish, infrastructural ruins and spectral jasmine—whose movements define what the sea returns and what it preserves as a submerged archive in motion.
Past & ongoing collaborations
Previously, I was based at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) and taught maritime anthropology and development sociology at the University of Bremen (2015–2023).
As a co-principal investigator, I have led projects funded by the DFG, the US SSRC, and the Leibniz Association, collaborating with partners across the Dutch Caribbean and island Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore).
Our last transregional project, BlueUrban (DFG-funded, 2020–2023), examined how land reclamation, cultural histories of sand, giant seawalls and other ´adaptive´ infrastructural interventions transform social relations between cities and seas in the Indo-Malay-Philippine archipelago. I latterly turned my focus to specultative visions of floating cities and infrastructural futures, tracing their contested meanings for coastal collectives while bringing together older concerns around oceanic privatisation and waterfront development.
Beyond academia, my practice was shaped through roles at the Climate Secretariat (Bonn), CGIAR-WorldFish (Penang), the Alola Foundation (Timor-Leste), and Singapore’s National Youth Council and Beyond Social Services. Throughout these diverse mandates, writing remained my central anchor and first love. This led to the founding of Ink & Ethos—an initiative bridging academic storytelling with multigenre narrative.
Other roles:
Associate Editor, Maritime Studies
Editorial board member, the journal Ocean and Society &
Marine Social Sciences and the Blue Humanities (Springer book series)