Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OCN (Ocean Crime Narratives: A polyhedral assessment of hegemonic discourse on environmental crime and harm at sea (1982-present))
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-10-01 bis 2025-03-31
With the international Law of the Sea (UNCLOS 1982), narratives on environmental crimes and harms at sea have changed their views of ocean governance, sustainability, and human rights, shaping international, hegemonic discourses. A growing corpus of contemporary literary and film narratives discusses environmental criminality at sea as subject to contested international and state jurisdiction, harmful to oceanic sustainability and threatening human rights, and criminal uncertainly. Literature and film are only part of these environmental harm discourses, since policymakers, lawyers and scientists are its main producers. How do discourses in the cultural and scientific realms co-create conceptions, arguments and ideas that underpin the actual international regulations and policy negotiations around environmental crime and harm at sea? OCN responds to this new challenge with three objectives: 1) to analyze the narratives around environmental crime and harm at sea in a new, unexamined corpus of post-1982 literature and film; 2) to conduct a novel narrative analysis of environmental sea crime and harm discourses aiming for governance from the perspective of oceanography, green criminology, and political ecology; 3) to produce a polyhedral assessment of hegemonic, international discourse on environmental crime and harm at sea today. OCN examines its corpus of literary, filmic and expert narratives dealing with three areas: a) exploitation of biological and mineral marine resources; b) toxic waste and plastic dumping; c) harmful climate-change effects on oceanic ecosystems. The project tests an interdisciplinary analysis for a fresher, critical view of hegemonic, international environmental crime discourses at sea.
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.
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.
The OCN results are going beyond the state of the arts in three main directions:
1. We are uncovering narrative strategies that not only work in literary and film texts but that are actively functioning in discourses that are today points of reference for the regulation of environmental harm at sea.
2. The project is detecting key concepts that are assumed as valid and not sufficiently interrogated in the regulating and scientific reports of reference in relation to sea management ans scientific knowledge. Their narrative uses show that these are more conflictive that assumed.
3. The study of cinema is going beyond the state of the art in its focusing on the legacies of ocean historical representation and in the incorporation of the environmental impact of film-making production.
4. We are growingly focusing on the Meditarranean as a valid test case to understand the most conflictive tensions between local contexts and global discourses.
1. We are uncovering narrative strategies that not only work in literary and film texts but that are actively functioning in discourses that are today points of reference for the regulation of environmental harm at sea.
2. The project is detecting key concepts that are assumed as valid and not sufficiently interrogated in the regulating and scientific reports of reference in relation to sea management ans scientific knowledge. Their narrative uses show that these are more conflictive that assumed.
3. The study of cinema is going beyond the state of the art in its focusing on the legacies of ocean historical representation and in the incorporation of the environmental impact of film-making production.
4. We are growingly focusing on the Meditarranean as a valid test case to understand the most conflictive tensions between local contexts and global discourses.