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First, generally referred to a “more-than-human” scholarship, posthumanist theories (Barad 2003; Alaimo 2010; Birke, Bryld, and Lykke 2004) and multispecies approaches (Kirksey 2014; A. Tsing 2015; van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016) have been central for decentering humans in social processes, i.e. seeing humans as part of assemblages consisting of humans, but also including various kinds of nonhumans like animals, plants and materials. Not seeing worlds as composed of stable and separate entities engaging in relations with each other, but rather as emergent results of ongoing relational processes, this approach has emphasized the ways in which for instance humans and nonhumans are constitutively entangled through processes of “becoming-with” (Haraway 2008; Margulis and Sagan 2007). Such processes involve a variety of forces and components, which come together in temporary stable, but inherently unstable, assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 2010). As Tsing (2013, 2012) and others (Latour 2007; Bingham and Hinchliffe 2008; Lorimer 2012; Law and Lien 2013) have emphasized, this constitutive entanglement of humans and nonhumans in “more-than-human socialities” is processual and fluid, making the shape of relations between humans and nonhumans and the distribution of agency between them not something that is given, but something which is rather enacted in and through relational practices.

Recent rethinking of the notion of domestication, which the PI has been a major contributor to (Remme 2014, 2018, 2021), also shows us that human-nonhuman relations also include aspects such as affects, spatiality and temporality (Lorimer 2015; Archambault 2016; Brice 2014), that they are heterogeneous, unruly and livelier than occurring simply as resources to be harvested or managed (Lien, Swanson, and Ween 2018; Lorimer 2015). Departing from much previous social science that is based on the fundamental division of culture and nature, humans and nonhumans, where only the former is ascribed agency and relates to the latter primarily through use and management, more-than-human scholarship helps us attend to the ways in which humans and nonhumans are mutually entangled and to how such “naturecultures” emerge and transform (Kirksey 2015).

To the extent that the human-marine relations are entangled with material things such as fishing gear, boats or scientific equipment, the project will also draw on the approach to materiality known as “New Materialism”, an approach that like other posthumanist approaches attends to the vibrancy (Bennett 2010) and agentive force of things (Barad 2003), thus contributing further to emplacing humans with a wide network that include also material forces (Coole and Frost 2010).

A further line of theorization which will inform this project is feminist posthumanist work that has a long tradition of challenging andro-and anthropocentric perspectives and foreground an understanding of humans as interconnected, entangled and transcorporeal beings that become in webs of material relations (Alaimo 2010, 2012, 2016; Cielemecka and Daigle 2019). Recognizing thus that both humans and nonhumans are active contributors to processes of “becoming-with” each other, these theoretical approaches allow for a variety of forms and processes of relations to be revealed between humans, animals and materials which will be particularly useful for a project which aims to move the anthropology of fishing beyond studies of human use and management of marine resources.

SEATIMES draws also on a subset of approaches within more-than-human scholarship that pays particular attention to the temporal aspects of human-animal relations. Contributions focusing on resources have shown that the processes of turning something into a resource (T.Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014) has evident temporal aspects. Resources may “frame the past, present and future in certain ways; they propose or preclude certain kinds of time reckoning; they inscribe teleologies; and they are imbued with affects of time, such as nostalgia, hope, dread, and spontaneity” (Ferry and Limbert 2008, 4). However, also other approaches that look beyond resource relations between humans and nonhumans underscore how temporality is made through practices involving both humans and nonhumans. Bird Rose’s (2012) concept of “multispecies knots of time” for instance, has been critical in drawing attention to how synchronicities in multispecies relations are embodied achievements and that processes such as extinction leads to the undoing and transformation of time. Bastian (2017) has taken further and looked at how animals are drawn in and out of people’s everyday existence, and asks what kind of time givers these animals thus become. Another more practice-oriented approach is inspired by Ingold’s (2000) argument that time is embodied and enacted through practice and Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (2004) in which spacetimes take shape through relations of different tempos and rhythms. This has contributed to a growing awareness in more-than-human scholarship of how time is experienced and made through diverse and imbricated multispecies relational practices. Looking at these processes as fundamentally “naturecultural”, these theoretical approaches make it evident that a variety of, not always in synch, more-than-human temporalities and rhythms are involved in for instance rice production (Gan 2016; Remme 2021), possums’ intrusion in human efforts at home-making (Power 2010), tidal rhythms and seasonalities (Jones 2011; Krause 2013), lawn growing and gardening (Robbins 2007; Doody et al. 2014), producing grapes (Brice 2014), tending to bees (Phillips 2020) and caring for soil (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015).

For SEATIMES these theoretical approaches will contribute to direct our attention to how climate change unties and re-ties heterogeneous, unstable and co-existing forms of multispecies knots of time in the different zones.

Third, with its focus on human-marine ecologies, the project will further draw on and contribute to developing an “amphibious anthropology” by rethinking the ways in which humans and marine worlds are interconnected in what has become known as “�������-���dz�������”r������پ��DzԲ� (Linton and Budds 2014; Jensen 2017; Brown and Peters 2018). As Jensen (2017) has noted, there has been an increasing attention to water related disasters and people are forced to adapt to their changing watery environments in ways that reveals their amphibious circumstances (Jensen 2017). These attentions have given rise to a small, but promising, scholarly effort to build an amphibious anthropology which looks at human entanglement with water and oceanic environments (e.g. Hastrup and Hastrup 2017; Morita and Jensen 2017; Krause 2017).

SEATIMES will contribute to this field,

but will also add an important component, namely the unruly liveliness of marine life. While much of the current amphibious anthropology and other forms of maritime anthropology share with SEATIMES a focus on human relations with water and oceans, they tend to approach the sea as a singular entity or as a surface for transport, without sufficient attention to the myriads of life forms living and moving below water. By thus combining this scholarship with the previously mentioned theoretical approaches that emphasize the unruly liveliness of marine life and its entanglements in human-marine ecologies, the project will contribute to this emerging amphibious anthropology by tuning in on the processes that go on “beneath the waves” (Steinberg 2013).