Objective
SeaLife is the is the first comparative anthropological investigation into the lives and knowledge of seafarers across three ocean regions, at a time when automation, offshore energy infrastructures, and maritime conflicts are transforming ocean. While seafarers’ labour sustains global circulation, exploration, and extraction, they remain largely invisible in dominant accounts of the sea.
The project asks how seafarers experience and respond to these transformations, and how their practices, skills, and meanings both shape and are reshaped by automation, energy regimes, and security orders. By foregrounding seafarers’ lived worlds, SeaLife reimagines the sea not as an empty surface, but as a field of situated knowledge, memory, and political struggle.
Three sites provide a comparative frame: the North Sea as a hub of offshore energy and maritime automation with a deep naval history; the Caribbean, where legacies of slavery, migration, and petroleum exports intersect with energy politics; and the West Indian Ocean, marked by prospective oil development and enduring seafaring traditions. Juxtaposing these regions allows SeaLife to trace how oceanic labour and knowledge are entangled with planetary transformations in differentiated but connected ways.
The project's objectives are: (1) to document ethnographically how seafarers live, experience, and navigate transformations of energy, technology, and power; (2) to analyse historically and comparatively how seafarers’ knowledge and practices intersect with global processes across the sea; and (3) to establish an anthropology of seafaring that develops new theoretical and methodological tools for studying ocean worlds.
Combining multi-sited ethnography aboard ships and in ports with archival research and the recovery of seafarers’ histories through oral accounts and material culture, SeaLife advances a cosmopolitical theory of the sea—revealing seafarers as key mediators of global change and planetary futures.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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Keywords
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2026-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
5020 Bergen
Norway
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.