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Seafarers. Life, Meanings and Power in a Changing Oceanic World

Objectif

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.

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Mots‑clés

Programme(s)

Thème(s)

Régime de financement

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Appel à propositions

(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) ERC-2026-STG

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Institution d’accueil

UNIVERSITETET I BERGEN
Contribution nette de l'UE
€ 1 526 187,00
Coût total
€ 1 526 187,00

Bénéficiaires (1)