Routledge Handbook of Critical Ocean Studies

Reviews / Votes

"This handbook is a monumental effort, exceptionally well done and greatly enriched by the editors' introductory exposition of "critical ocean studies." The oceans are often viewed as frontiers only tentatively visited, much less colonized, by humans. This handbook represents a critical reflection on the fact that the oceans have been far more central to human experience, practice, and culture than that. It's a much needed and welcome effort to discern and shape the contours of cutting edge studies of the oceans and their socio-economic, cultural, and ecological systems. The chapters are grounded in scholarship from the humanities and the social sciences, but the work reported on comes from dynamic and ever-shifting zones of transdisciplinarity, making it reasonable to see an "oceanic turn" therein and to claim "critical ocean studies" as a discipline in and of itself. Sensitive to the novelty of much of this, the chapter authors are careful to provide helpful reviews of relevant literatures while also pointing to new knowledge and concepts (such as "wet ontologies" and "ocean regimes"), making the book a gold mine for advanced students and scholars. There are intriguing and unusual topics, such as building human habitats at sea, the roles of seabirds in navigation, and the sonics of ocean understanding, as well as foci on inequities at sea such as labour in the offshore industrial fisheries and the construction of new modes and shapes of governance dealing with, for example, sea level rise, migration, and opening of the Arctic. Consistent throughout is respect for the complexities and indeterminacies of changing oceans and commitment to knowledge and practice that support social and ecological justice."

Bonnie McCay, Retired Professor, Dept of Human Ecology, Rutgers the State University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA

"Anyone tempted to think of oceans as barren and monotonous spaces remote from people and human concerns should consult this handbook. As contributors to this volume show, we need to scrutinize past and present knowledge creation in order to imagine new and diverse ways of knowing that may secure the health of the oceans and our future. The enterprise of critical ocean studies demonstrates the central role for the humanities in our collective quest for a more just, sustainable ocean."

Helen M. Rozwadowski, Professor of History and Founder of the Maritime Studies Program at the University of Connecticut