I have been working with the fantastic PhD student Merdeka Agus Saputra for a couple years now as his advisor. He conducted extensive research on seabed tin mining offshore of Bangka and Belitung Islands, Indonesia. We collaborated on writing up this theoretically and empirically rich paper considering the geo-political, deeply material, and embodied relations of artisanal and industrial seabed tin mining. I’m very proud of Saputra’s dedicated and caring fieldwork, as well as careful and critical analysis, and am excited we got to think together through this piece. please check it out and pass it around.

Merdeka Agus Saputra & Katherine G. Sammler (25 Apr 2024): Volumetric, embodied and geologic geopolitics of the seabed: offshore tin mining in Indonesia, Territory,
Politics, Governance, DOI: 10.1080/21622671.2024.2334821

ABSTRACT This paper introduces empirical research on tin divers’ bodily experience of seabed mining concerning offshore Bangka and Belitung Islands, Indonesia, critical seabed mining sites. To govern the seabed off these Islands, ‘classic’ geopolitical approaches such as marine spatial planning (MSP) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) hierarchically construct the seabed through two-dimensional mapping and policy, occluding specific tin diving practices on the seabed. Moving from such flat geopolitical understandings of the ocean floor, this paper offers new engagements with feminist geopolitics, volumetric territory and social ocean studies to think about the seabed through its volume, the bodies that are immersed within and animate it, and its geologic materiality. It does so by examining intimate tin diving relations between human bodies, volumetric space and ore bodies in relation to the contemporary geopolitical making of the seabed territory. Whilst many scholars have engaged with this volumetric-embodied-geologic approach, this paper argues that the nexus of volumetric space, bodies (embodied experiences) and geologic materiality in tin diving are a crucial tactical point for diverse mining governance actors, sustaining dangerous labour, mining accidents and death in tin diving.

KEYWORDS Access; tactical point; materiality; political ecology; territories; feminist geopolitics