FAIRShips explores ships as grassroots platforms related to contemporary insurgencies and indigenous movements and analytical units for an in-depth study of an emerging politicization of the oceans that remains uncharted. Addressing multiple gaps in the literature, the project builds on the socio-economic centrality of the ship to gauge its potential for grassroots activism and insurgent politics beyond the territory of the nation-state and terracentric trends in social theory. The latter tend to identify grassroots activism and indigenous insurgency largely with terrestrial spaces on dry land, such as cities and mountains or forests, respectively. Moreover, policy debates on sea-centered “crises”, such as climate change, overexploitation, and refugee “flows”, often exclude indigenous-led perspectives and responses to these crises. Similarly, critical studies of modern shipping tend to evacuate insurgent politics, chiefly focusing on labor and logistics. As a result, the relationship between the socio-environmental study of the oceans and indigenous insurgent politics in the same oceans is under-theorized and under-investigated. This proposal – and the mapping program it envisages - aims to pioneer a research avenue on mapping, analyzing, and theorizing insurgent contemporary seas through the empirical trope of the fair ship.