Dr. Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa
Welcome! I´m an anthropologist, writer, and lecturer based at the University of Bonn (BCDSS), and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).
My research explores diverse cultural histories and more-than-human politics that intersect maritime and urban challenges. These themes include disaster (mal)adaptation, wildlife conservation inequities, infrastructural violence, forced displacement, toxicity and global shipping, alongside the ecologies of extractivism that underpin them.
Much of my past ethnographic work focuses on postcolonial archipelagic South and Southeast Asia, with connections across the east Caribbean.
For the most part, I grew up in maritime port cities – Abu Dhabi, Colombo, and Singapore. I received my graduate training at the Universities of Oxford and Bonn, while remaining close to my roots in the anthropology of Southeast Asia, theatre studies, and Anglophone literature (NUS, Singapore). I also possess a postgrad diploma in counselling (Bamberg), through which I independently work with early career scholars within the ambit of Humanizing Academia.
I presently steer the partnership programme between the BCDSS and IDOS, while teaching graduate courses in critical development studies.
During my last few years as senior scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), I served as co-principal investigator on two third-party transregional projects, the DFG-funded BlueUrban project (SPP 1889), and the US Social Science Research Council´s co-learning platform, the Southern Collective. I continue to collaborate as a co-curator and writer on related science-arts projects, including the Reverberations Counter-atlas and the Dakshin Foundation-led Sea Lexicon.
Outside of formal academia, I´ve had stints at the CGIAR-WorldFish Centre HQ (Penang), the Climate Secretariat (Bonn), and the National Youth Council (Singapore).
Why Tidescapes?
When waters exist, loaves grow. But never, my soul, did water grow from loaf – Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207-1273)
Intertidal zones are shapeshifting milieus, characterised by diverse rhythms, flows and temporal registers. They are home to hybrid ecologies of animal, vegetal, and geological life as marine, riverine, brackish and groundwaters mingle and circulate.
Historically, tidal spaces have served as diverse frontiers in human and more-than-human histories: as territories to be fought for and fought over, as conduits of/for cultural exchange, and as dis/connected worlds of colonial and imperial encounter, enslavement, and resource extraction.
Climate-induced changes across water, land, the atmospheric, and the subterranean are more acutely experienced in such spaces. In the so called ´global south´ intertidal spaces have often historically been home to marginalised communities, whether it be the vast floodplains and mangrove forests of the deltaic Sunderbans, or the rapidly subsiding urban fabric of northern and western Java.
Metaphorically, tidescapes are interstices through which lively theorisations about hybrid matter and practices at placemaking unfold. Freshwater salinisation, land subsidence, liquefaction and other cascading processes warrant new pathways of ingenuity and for re-imagining radically different approaches towards multispecies dwelling.
Materially, tidescapes also present living archives. They offer to be read as vital, multi-layered geoecologies for tracing the ebbs and flows of vastly different kinds of tides – of circulating ideas, social practices and collective memory – as the boundaries and edges of everyday terra-aqueous existence is constantly remade.