Ocean Legalities: The Law and Life of the Sea

Stacy Alaimo is Professor of English and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. Alaimo’s books include Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010), and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016). She is currently finishing the book Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss, and starting Liquid Carbon and other Unthinkable States, which considers how to conceptualize acidification and other threats to marine ecologies.

Amy Braun is a PhD candidate in geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with research interests in political ecology, technoscience studies, and cultural studies. Her current work explores the role of marine biotechnology in sustainable development discourse and practice, focusing on the development of algal biofuels and the enrollment of marine life in economic, national, and environmental security priorities.

Irus Braverman is Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Geography at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. She is author of Planted Flags: Trees, Land, and Law in Israel Palestine (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford University Press, 2012), and Wild Life: The Institution of Nature (Stanford University Press, 2015), and co-editor of The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford University Press, 2014) and Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities (Routledge 2016). Braverman is currently working on the monograph Coral Whisperers: Scientists on The Brink (The University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) and on the edited collection Gene Editing, Law, and the Environment: Life Beyond the Human (Routledge, forthcoming). 

Holly Jean Buck is a doctoral candidate in Development Sociology at Cornell University, and a faculty fellow with the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment at American University in Washington, DC. She is interested in public deliberation of emerging technologies, algae cultivation and aquaculture, and interactions between climate intervention and food systems. Holly holds a M.Sc. in Human Ecology from Lund University in Sweden, and previously worked in the geospatial industry.

Jennifer L. Gaynor earned her PhD in History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and prior to coming to SUNY at Buffalo held fellowships at Michigan, Cornell, and the Australian National University. A scholar of Southeast Asia and its surrounding seas from the seventeenth century to the present, she has published her research in articles and chapters, as well as a book, Intertidal History in Island Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press). Formal study of coral reef ecology and certification as a scuba instructor inform her research, which currently examines the changing material, cultural, and legal geography of Asian seas and coasts.

Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He is author of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (California, 2009) and Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton, 2016). He is currently work on a new project about ocean wave science and its politics, economics, and cultural implication.

Elizabeth Johnson is a human geographer and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is interested in how life and its study are becoming re-valued as part of the innovation economy and amid growing efforts in ecological securitization. She has spent the last several years researching the field of “biomimicry.” She is presently working on a book manuscript titled,  Working Life: Biomimesis and the Politics of Biological Productivity. She is currently at work on new research on ocean ecologies and jellyfish.

Stephanie Jones, BA and LLB (ANU), PhD (Cambridge) is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK. She works on texts about the Indian Ocean, and within the inter-discipline of law and literature. Her publications include papers on the poetics of maritime law; piracy and privateering; literary and legal belonging: and East African and South Asian literatures. She is writing a monograph that explores piracy in relation to intellectual histories of justice, obligation, and right.

Zsofia Korosy is a doctoral candidate in law at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). She holds Honours degrees in Arts (Politics and International Relations) and Law from UNSW, and a Master of Laws from Yale Law School. Her research examines the development of international law as it regulates the environmental resources of the Pacific Ocean.

Berit Kristoffersen is an associate professor in political geography and political science at University of Tromsø.  Her research explores how present and future challenges are negotiated in the Arctic; climate change strategies, changing environmentalism, resource networks and politics relating to natural resources, and how this is can be analyzed in across scale.

Jessica Lehman is an AW Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received a PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota with a dissertation called Planetary Sea: Oceanography and the Making of the World Ocean. Her research interests include international environmental politics, the geographies of science, uncertainty, and the science and geopolitics of oceans.

Astrida Neimanis is a Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Working between feminism and environmental humanities, she writes about bodies, water, weather, and other ecological matters. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, an exploration of embodiment from the perspective of watery connection and difference, is forthcoming in January 2017. She is also Associate Editor of the journal Environmental Humanities. 

Susan Reid is an arts developer, curator, lawyer and environmental protector. Her recent curatorial projects in northern Australia engaged artists working in environmentally responsive practices, including artists from Cape York and the Torres Strait Islands who share strong community and storying connections to country and sea. Reid became a lawyer to further her environmental interests and gained an LLM focused on international marine and climate law. She is researching ocean relationalities, imaginaries and jurisprudence as an MPhil candidate with the University of Sydney.

Alison Rieser is professor of geography at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and professor emerita at the University of Maine Law School. She has broad experience as a fisheries policy advisor to governments and NGOs. Her book on the classification of endangered marine species, The Case of the Green Turtle: An Uncensored History of a Conservation Icon, was published in 2012. She is author of numerous journal articles on ocean governance. Her latest project is a political biography of herring.

Katherine G. Sammler is an Assistant Professor in Global Studies and Maritime Affairs at California State University Maritime Academy. Her research explores how political and jurisdictional boundaries assimilate and dissimulate the geophysical properties of the spaces and mediums they mark. Such studies include national and private claims made on elements of sea, air, wind, rain and outer space.

Astrid Schrader works at the intersections of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Human-Animal Studies and Feminist and Poststructuralist Theories. Her work explores questions of responsibility, care and agency in scientific knowledge production. She has been particularly interested in the scientific studies of marine microbes (such as dinoflagellates). In this and other contexts, she has explored the link between human-exceptionalism and conceptions of time. Her current project examines the scientific reconfigurations of life and death through research into programmed cell death in unicellular marine microbes. Her work has been published in the journals Social Studies of Science, Environmental Philosophy, and differences.

Kristen L. Shake is from Anchorage, Alaska. She earned her B.S. in Geography and M.S. in Oceanography from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Kristen is currently a PhD Candidate in Geography at Clark University, where her dissertation explores the connections that persist between changing sea ice conditions and law in the Bering and Beaufort Seas. Her research interests include Arctic marine policy, polar climate change, legal geography and science communication.

Philip Steinberg is Professor of Political Geography and Director of IBRU: The Centre for Borders Research at Durham University. His research focuses on the projection of social power to spaces whose geophysical and geographic characteristics make them resistant to state territorialisation, including the ocean (The Social Construction of the Ocean, 2001), the Arctic (Contesting the Arctic, 2015), the universe of electronic communication (Managing the Infosphere, 2008), and the delta city (What Is a City?, 2008). He presently directs the Leverhulme Trust-funded ICE LAW Project and is Editor-in-Chief of Political Geography.