To aid research on 'Sovereignty Submerged: The Politics of Presence in the Bismarck Archipelago'

PATRICK NASON, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, received a grant in April 2015 to aid research on 'Sovereignty Submerged: The Politics of Presence in the Bismarck Archipelago,' supervised by Dr. Paige West. This research examined how indigenous citizens and expatriate environmental activists on the island of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea articulate claims to oceanic space. These claims have come at a time when a multinational mining company is set to begin the world's first deep seabed mine just twenty kilometers from shore. While the company has argued the project will have minimal environmental or social impacts, participants of this study have voiced their concerns for the forms of nature and culture within the region. Through interviews, translations, and participant observations, this research discovered how oceanic space is produced through the rhythmic movement of beings across it. When these beings meet, they reveal to each other a glimpse of the material forces that brought them together. Space emerges as the sum of these forces; it is the materialization of each person's origin story. Consideration of the rhythms involved in spatial production enables a critique of the movement of capital and conservation into deep spaces. In showing how spaces like the Bismarck Sea are sites of origin, we can critique a kind of dispossession that precedes the present -- one that endangers not only specific forms of life but the possibilities of the political.