# Rapti Siriwardane

> Rapti Siriwardane de Zoysa | Tidescapes


## Posts

- [Reverberations Counter-Atlas](https://raptisiriwardane.com/reverberations-counter-atlas): Founding co-curatorsPeter Kæergaard Anderson Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa Sayan Dey Damian Borovsky Welcome to the Reverberations Counter-Atlas!As an experimental, open-ended cartographic project, it brings into conversation wildly eclectic transoceanic “things” that flow, circulate, and sojourn – allegorically as reverberations – across and beyond Indian Ocean worlds, bridging the historic and the contemporary. Among other things, its digital canvas is intended as a pedagogical tool for and beyond the blue humanities. It offers contemplative space for the reimagination of various kinds of counter-dominant mappings (and their concomitant mobility-inspired concepts), through multimodal forms of transoceanic storytelling. As a collaborative endeavour, the counter-atlas invites contributions… Read More »
- [The Southern Collective](https://raptisiriwardane.com/the-southern-collective): Funded by the US SSRC’s Collaboratories for the Indian Ocean region — a transnational network of marine scholars, activists, artists and practitioners committed to pluralising and democratising oceanic and coastal knowledge- making across Indian Ocean worlds.
- [MaRiTA (Zanzibar, Tanzania)](https://raptisiriwardane.com/marita-she-sells-seashells-by-the-seashore-local-marine-taxonomic-knowledge-systems-and-their-role-in-community-based-conservation-practices-in-zanzibars-shell-economy): [ ZMT Core budget funded (2017-2018) ] |  Tracing gendered intergenerational taxonomic knowledge among shell gleaners in Zanzibar. Partner: Institute of Marine Science, Zanzibar.
- [CIRCULATIONS (Bonaire, Jamaica)](https://raptisiriwardane.com/circulations-island-connectivities-and-the-ambivalent-storying-of-invasive-seagrass): [ ZMT Core budget funded (2017-2018) ] |  Tracing the contradictory meanings of ‘invasive’ and nuisance species through the sojourning stories of seagrasses and macroalgae in the eastern Caribbean (Bonaire & Jamaica). Partners: STINAPA, Dutch Nature Caribbean Association, and the University of the West Indies.
- [BAKAU (Penang, Malaysia)](https://raptisiriwardane.com/bakau-biodiversity-resources-and-perceptions-a-comparison-of-mangrove-forests-in-rural-versus-urban-settings-of-penang-malaysia): [ ZMT Core budget funded (2017-2018) ]  |   Exploring the postcolonial political, folkloric, spectral, ethical, and techno-scientific meanings of urban mangroves in Penang amid rapid land use change, deforestation, and coastal reclamation. Partners: Univerti Sains Malaysia (CEMACS) & Bangor University
- [BlueUrban (Indonesian archipelago, Singapore)](https://raptisiriwardane.com/blueurban-towards-blue-urbanism-for-sea-level-change-adaptation-global-trajectories-and-speculative-futuring-in-island-southeast-asia): [ DFG-funded, 2020-2023 ]  |  A second-phase project following BlueUrban. Deepens an understanding into how global networks of floating city experimentation for living with sea change influence speculative infrastructural futures of Javanese urban centres, and their often terra-centric planning visions and imaginaries. Partners: National University of Singapore (Sociology), Universitas Indonesia
- [EMERSA (Manila,Jakarta & Singapore)](https://raptisiriwardane.com/emersa-epistemic-mobilities-and-the-governance-of-environmental-risks-in-island-southeast-asia): [ DFG-funded, 2016-2020 ]  |                An interdisciplinary project critically exploring how certain epistemologies and ‘best practices’ gain political traction and legitimacy as adaptation solutions to sea level rise and subsidence in Manila, Singapore, and Jakarta. Partners: National University of Singapore (Sociology), Universitas Indonesia, and Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Asia and the Pacific (Philippines)

## Pages

- [POESIS](https://raptisiriwardane.com/poesis): Courtesy: Destiny Photography, by permission from Upsplash POESIS: Power, Knowledge, and Servitude at Sea A cross-institutional BCDSS–IDOS Research Group (2026–2033) POESIS approaches the sea not as a passive backdrop but as an archive in motion: a generative site of political and epistemic struggle that illuminates wider relations of asymmetric dependency and attachment beyond the maritime itself. Drawing on decolonial feminist, southern, pluriversal, and more-than-human thought, we investigate how forms of servitude persist across interconnected hydrosocial worlds, rooted in the legacies of imperialism, slavery, and developmentalist dispossession.  Our focus is on the forms of labour, knowledge, and ecological life that are drawn… Read More »
- [Bio](https://raptisiriwardane.com/biography): 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 theater studies at the National University of Singapore. I am interested in the affective and more-than-human lives of oceanic and urban worlds, especially in how desire, meanings, and forms of attachment are lived and actively reworked within uneven relations of dependency, often shaped by the long… Read More »
- [Talks](https://raptisiriwardane.com/talks): Select events organized 09/2023           Conference co-organiser, “Between Blue Urbanism and Tanah Air: Urban Experiments, Circulations and Placemaking as Sea Level                                 Change Adaptation”,  Jakarta (11-13, September 2023), with Dr. Johannes Herbeck (host – Universitas Indonesia)   08/2023            Convenor, “Blue Hauntologies and Spectral Seas”, Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference (RGS-IBG 2023), London – double                                   panel 08/2021             Co-convenor (with Dr. Alin… Read More »
- [Crafts](https://raptisiriwardane.com/craftwork): Ceramics and painting functional objects, including fabric, are close to my heart. I continue to train with the Colombo-based French-Swiss ceramist Sabine Wittachy in her studio L´Atelier de Sabine. Much of my work is inspired by oceanic sensibilities, encompassing littoral animal and plant life. Breakfast set, “Seagrasses” (wheel thrown & glaze fired), Dec 2021 Dinner plate, “After Ukraine” (Feb 2022) “Terra-aqueous” (Dec 2006)
- [Theatre](https://raptisiriwardane.com/theatre): Theatre Performance work I received my earliest training within the Trinity College Speech and Drama assessment framework (Grades 4-7), under the tutelage of Nirmali Hettiarachchi during my high-school years in Colombo. I continued my undergrad training in theatre at the National University of Singapore.  I´ve been working with a number of semi-professional companies since 1997, while envisioning experimental ways of combining theatre praxis (of the Boal tradition), with teaching and community re/search.  Select performances (theatre)  1996: The British School in Colombo – A Midsummer Night´s Dream (Titania)  1997: The British School in Colombo – Excerpt from The Merchant of Venice (Portia) 1998:… Read More »
- [Tidescapes Collab](https://raptisiriwardane.com/tidescapes-collab): Tidescapes Collaborative The Tidescapes Collaborative is a non-profit initiative that supports littoral communities in envisioning alternatives to flood-induced displacement.   It is a space for reimagining equitable multispecies futures through vision building and local experiments at placemaking.    WHO For changemakers, researchers, artists, designers, educators, planners and practitioners from majority-world regions that ask – what other worlds are possible? For those committed to the imperative of decolonizing and pluralizing ideas around what “adaptation” means across oceanic and littoral sites. WHAT In a rapidly warming and overbuilt world, underscored by profound transformations across oceans, aquifers, deltas, and riverways, Tidescapes offers an inclusive, safe space… Read More »
- [Reverberations Counter Atlas](https://raptisiriwardane.com/reverberations-counter-atlas): Reverberations Counter-Atlas February 2, 2024 Go to website here.  Founding co-curators: Peter Kæergaard Anderson, Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa, Sayan Dey, and Damian Borovsky Welcome to the Reverberations Counter-Atlas!As an experimental, open-ended cartographic project, it brings into conversation wildly eclectic transoceanic “things” that flow, resist, circulate, and sojourn – allegorically as reverberations – across and beyond Indian Ocean worlds, bridging the historic and the contemporary. Among other things, its digital canvas is intended as a pedagogical tool for and beyond the blue humanities. It offers contemplative space for the reimagination of various kinds of counter-dominant mappings (and their concomitant mobility-inspired concepts), through multimodal… Read More »
- [Gallery](https://raptisiriwardane.com/photography): Gallery I invite you to browse through my environmental documentary photography, particularly during ´field´ seasons.  Locations: The Sunderbans (India), Kuching and Penang (Malaysia); the Philippines; Indonesia (South Kalimantan, Jakarta, Pekalongan, Semarang, the Flores Islands); Inle (Myanmar); Trincomalee, Mineriya & Sigiriya (Sri Lanka); Croatia; Bonaire (the Dutch Caribbean); Jamaica; Hildesheim and Köln (Germany), South Africa, Cornwall (UK).   Waterscapes Pagodas and river runs. Inle, Myanmar, 2012. ©Rapti Siriwardane Flanking peacocks. Galle, Sri Lanka, 2021. ©Rapti Siriwardane Fluvial vendors on Martapura Riiver. Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan, 2023. ©Rapti Siriwardane Solitary splendour. Inle, Myanmar, 2012. ©Rapti Siriwardane The water-bearer. Inle, Myanmar, 2012. ©Rapti Siriwardane Marionrode Monastery.… Read More »
- [Teaching](https://raptisiriwardane.com/teaching-training): Teaching & Training A participatory field workshop on connective ecologies, together with Dr. Lucy Gillis & Dr. Sabine Engel for young STINAPA volunteers in Bonaire, the Dutch Caribbean (January 2018), R. Siriwardane © Over the past 10 years, I´ve been teaching maritime anthropology, development sociology, ethnographic research methods, together with academic reading and writing workshops at the Universities of Bonn, Bremen, and Universitas Indonesia (former course syllabi below).  I continually create new training programmes, academic modules, seminar series, and skills-based workshops within my own university context. Since 2004, I´ve also been working with research groups, CBOs, and social enterprises across Singapore, England, and… Read More »
- [Tidal Cities](https://raptisiriwardane.com/tidal-cities-a-visualisation-game): Tidal Cities – A Visualisation Game An example of a deliberative canvas with modular art assets (University of Bremen, December 2021) Tidal Cities© was an interdisciplinary, transnational experiment co-developed with Dr. Johannes Herbeck an urban geographer at Uni Bremen, and two landscape architects and artists, Dr. Antonio Jose Bimbao and Divya Rathod. We aimed at co-creating a visualisation-based pedagogical tool for contemplating and teaching post-disaster inequities and erasures inherent in coastal urban placemaking, drawing on ethnographic case studies from Metro Manila.  While the project was designed during the COVID-19 pandemic, its digital format integrated a game-based role play component to spark… Read More »
- [Curated Exhibitions](https://raptisiriwardane.com/exhibitions): Curated Exhibitions Contested Coastal Worlds – Care and Conviviality in Coastal Life “, Haus der Wissenschaft, Bremen, Germany (November 2022 – February 2023) Visit the virtual gallery here   (in partnership with Mangrove Maniacs, Bonaire; Dakshin Foundation, India; Mingas por el Mare , Ecuador; Bremen Dyke Association, DE; and Mercy Corps, Indonesia) 27/10/2022 | On Thursday, November 3, the Haus der Wissenschaft opened the photo exhibition “Contested Coastal Worlds – Care and Conviviality in Coastal Life.” I had the honour of co-curating this public photovoice exhibition while at Leibniz-ZMT, together with Dr. Johannes Herbeck from the Sustainability Research Center (Uni Bremen), and in… Read More »
- [Writing](https://raptisiriwardane.com/books-articles): Books, Articles, and Resources Book titles An Anthology of Non-Conformism (Spring 2024) As women/ wom!n, An Anthology of Non-conformism: Rebel Wom!n Words, Ways & Wonders invites us to take seriously our role in furthering ideas, values, and practices in everyday life that constitute oppression. In spotlighting a multilayered multiplicity of stories on rebels, resistance, and restoration, this becomes a handbook of “how to” transform instead of conforming to subjugation. The anthology introduces us to the ways and wonders of non-conformism and its liberatory uses, especially for women. Non-conformism is the watchword here: it is a lifesaver, a blueprint for new visions,… Read More »
- [Field Research Projects & Transoceanic Networks (2015-2024)](https://raptisiriwardane.com/field-research-projects-transoceanic-networks-2015-2024): Transnational Projects (2015-2024) Donor organisations: German Science Foundation (DFG); US Social Science Research Council (SSRC); European Union COST Action, and the Leibniz Association (via ZMT´s Core Budget)
- [Home](https://raptisiriwardane.com/): 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… Read More »

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