Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa, PhD
Welcome! I’m an environmental anthropologist, writer, and lecturer affiliated with the University of Bonn’s BCDSS Cluster of Excellence, and the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS).
I spent much of my formative years in the port cities of Abu Dhabi, Colombo, and Singapore—an upbringing that perhaps shaped my transcultural approach to ethnography and storytelling. My academic path began at NUS (Singapore), where I studied Southeast Asian anthropology, theatre, and Anglophone literature, before leading me into environmental geography and critical development studies at Oxford and Bonn.
My work focuses on South and Southeast Asia and their broader transoceanic connections, exploring the entanglements of place, identity, memory, and disaster, and how more-than-human subjects shape everyday life. I am particularly drawn to how terra-aqueous landscapes are lived, remembered, and transformed through movement and extraction, repair and regeneration.
I also examine the hauntological dimensions of disrupted ecologies, tracing how spectral histories persist in sites of environmental ruination, displacement, and speculative infrastructural development.
Prior to joining the University of Bonn, I was a senior researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), while serving as a visiting lecturer at the University of Bremen´s Anthropology Department.
Over the past decade, I’ve been part of several interdisciplinary collaborations, co-leading third-party funded scientific and artistic projects supported by the DFG and SSRC. These projects—including my own doctoral research—have explored diverse themes: coastal adaptation, land reclamation and floating urban design across the Indo-Malay-Philippine archipelago; postwar fisher lifeworlds, conflict and co-operation in northeastern Sri Lanka; and the governance of marine invasive species in the Dutch Antilles.
I also work closely with students and early-career scholars through the co-founded initiative Humanizing Academia, which fosters more inclusive and ethical spaces for thinking, learning, being and becoming, both within and beyond academia.
Beyond my scholarly and creative work, I have held positions at the CGIAR-WorldFish Centre Headquarters in Penang, the Climate Secretariat in Bonn, and the Singapore National Youth Council, engaging with policy, research, and advocacy in various capacities.
Why Tidescapes?
There goes a river, heaving an ocean behind it… 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. The boundaries and edges of everyday terra-aqueous existence are constantly remade.
As Alan Watts once reflected on the image of a gull persistently tapping at its prey: “the shell of the crab, the clam, the mussel is the boundary of its universe.” For a deeper exploration, listen to Watts’ Love of Waters.