Our team is fully involved in studying the various ways in which we narrate environmental harm at sea. In the first two years this study has been centered in examining literary and film narratives.
Our corpus:
With regards to the literary and film corpus, first of all, we have analyzed an important part of the proposed corpus. Secondly, we have delved into further corpus research and identified new literary works that we have incorporated due to their innovative and interesting perspective for two of the areas at this point. For resource extraction (especially fishing) we have identified Elisabet Moreno Boada’s L’esquerda (Catalan, Spain, 2023), Rodd Rathjen’s Buoyancy (Australia, 2019), Matías Ameglio’s Mar de lobos (Uruguay, 2023), and Kaur, S. Against the tide (India, 2023); with regards to climate change, we have incorporated Fernanda Trías Mugre rosa, Luis Hernán Castañeda’s El imperio de las mareas, and Arbugaev, Maxim & Arbugaeva Evgenia’s Haulout (2022). This has lead to reorganization of the corpus which is now more diverse and includes more independent and innovative production.
Narrative methods:
With regards to the methodological advances, we have delved into the narrative policy framework method and in narratological literary theory to see whether we could systematize a single method. However, as we have persuded the research we have found more useful to identify and to qualify the uses of specific narrative techniques that have never been applied to environmental harm at sea and that can also be observed as used in other textual discourses tackling the same phenomena. We have identifed several narrative strategies such as narrative environments, the catastrophe as temporal narrative device, we-narrative to produce an involving concern about the ocean, videogame narrative progression and character building, contrasting interviewing strategies in relation to the bestowed discourse authority, and narrative movement as transposed from water molecular dynamism. We have also incorporated Emory Roe’s narrative policy’s concepts of setting/scenario and analytic tip. As examples in our analysis of literary narratives, we have analyzed videogame narrative strategies to narrate the drastic future projections of rising sea levels in John Lanchaster’s The Wall; we have identified the uses of we-narrative to discuss human-species care official messages in Núria Perpinyà’s Diatomea and rising of sea levels reports; and we have observed the uses of uncertainty in narrating the Harmful Algal Blooms to attribute them to climate change and neglect human water eutrophication in Fernanda Trías’ Mugre rosa and HAB reports.
Identifying contested and contestable problems:
We have also identified complex issues that make the ocean environmental management more difficult to conceptualize and narrate, which have direct impact in the ways in which we use and regulate the ocean. Notorious contested issues for the moment are: differences between crime/harm, prevision of the future, the liquid nature of the sea, the vastness of the sea and our capacity to know it, sustainability, overlapping legislation, and polemical concepts such as ecocide, “ecosystem of services”, “global commons”, “marine protected areas”, “illegal fishing”, and “Harmful Algal Blooms”. Discussion on the historical origins, orientation of the concepts and problematic uses of them, should uncover the ways in which neocolonial and neoliberal capitalist strategies working against human rights and sustainability are being justified and embedded in discourse today.
Other environmental impact analytic methods:
OCN has developed unplanned research that opens up new avenues for future study. The study of film narratives has required an unprecedented reconstruction of the history of film representation of the ocean from its origins to today, which has revealed the multiple representation stereotypes such as the aquarium that are key, even conflictive, in the film presentation of environmental harm at sea today. This analysis has uncovered the challenging and especially harmful production of film at sea. This fact has led us to study not only the aesthetic narrative that the films produce but also the environmental impact that their film production involves.
Related project collaborations
OCN is hosting research projects that explore related interests such as the harm in the Mediterranean coasts in the intersection between urbanism and environmental harm, from the perspectives of comparative literature and of green criminology. It also collaborates with projects concerned with contemporary fishing cultural practices, from the patrimonial and gender perspectives in the Balearic Islands as test case.
