Assembling ocean life

Abstract

While welcoming the intervention of Winder and Le Heron (2006) as opening up a space for critical – and practical – engagement with ‘Blue Economy’ thinking, their employment of assemblage approaches could be extended. Doing so might produce a different conceptualization of the Blue Economy, while concurrently establishing new challenges for blue economic practices. In this commentary, I focus on three key areas: (1) the ontological separation of land and sea and the conceptualization of ‘marine space’; (2) the ‘liveliness’ of oceans; and (3) practical possibilities for Blue Economy policies to draw on and engage with ‘wet ontologies’. I argue that future geographical research on the Blue Economy would benefit from moving away from the categorizations of the ‘ecological’ or ‘bio’ and towards a fuller engagement with the diversity of actants and forces that contribute to the emergence of new practices, policies and (de)territorializations.