Our Fields of Engagement

We engage in four activities through which we produce, develop and disseminate knowledge for action and theory.  

research

We want to inspire students within and beyond the university to re-orient their critical capacities towards the blue continent, which despite a recent renaissance in research needs ever more efforts to  study  past and present modes of production, domination, liberation, subject and value creation at sea.  
 

free teaching

We are already experimenting with teaching modules and materials that place the sea at the center of critical inquiry. At the American University of Beirut for example an undergraduate course on Sea & Society invites students to a tour-de-force survey of past and present maritime realities of trade and technology, slavery and capitalism, offshore extractionism and coastal privatization, as well as liberation movements and maritime activisms, polluted oceans and liberated commons. Ultimately, we also hope to create a series of open & free courses around these themes.

awareness

The sea today is not a flat and an empty space, but a site of connections, struggles, emancipations, hopes and disasters that all are linked to past and present realities on land in the most direct ways. We therefore seek to create awareness about the importance of the sea in our lives at all these levels  (past, present, future). 
 

public events

We are promoting a conversational, open and accessible format for research, action and theory produced by academics, artists and activists committed to the primacy of the sea in our public imagination. We are therefore hosting a series of  public events and inviting friends, colleagues and others to present their thoughts, ideas and provocations about the best ways to promote these ideas for broader audiences.