Subversive Submersives: the unseen infrastructures of the Southern Ocean

Description

Though widely perceived as a pristine wilderness, the Southern Ocean is an urbanising space and has been for some time. Views of the high seas as distant, uncultivated, and uninhabitable neglect increasing evidence of urban processes in these spaces; just as popular visual representations of the Antarctic region as remote and untouched do little to contribute to a critical discussion of its oceanic volume. These environments often fail to appear in discourses that frame contemporary notions of urbanisation and key to this disregard is the matter of their representation. Registering how the urban is invisible in the ocean—and also how the ocean is unseen in the urban—is made more urgent however given the ocean’s critical role in regulating this planet’s atmosphere. This inquiry is therefore sited in the disregarded infrastructural landscape of the Southern Ocean: the world’s ‘newest’ and most vulnerable ocean, which is host to unique intersections between water, science, governance, agents, and others. New technologies expanding into this space (like AUVs and floating robot swarms for research and resource speculation) present an altogether radical consideration of planet-scaled infrastructures, where intelligences operating for thinly veiled commercial benefit within the ocean generate complex legal, ecological, and moral concerns; and signal an escalation of potentially destructive processes to sustain the scientific, geopolitical, and commercial ambitions of populations on dry land. No longer a remote wilderness, the Southern Ocean is instead a vast urbanising field embedded with technology and, significantly, unseen. This paper will ‘re-present’ the Southern Ocean via comparative cartographies and non-representational practices as the basis for a cross-examination of urbanisation in the ocean. For underneath the machinery of resource extraction and exploitation in the ocean lie significant questions regarding representations of the urban as they manifest outside the usual conventions of the city.

Period	25 Feb 2022 → 1 Mar 2022
Event title	Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers 2022
Event type	Conference
Location	New York, United States of America, New YorkShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International