Education
University of Bonn, Centre for Development Research (ZEF), Development Anthrology (2015), summa cum laude
University of Oxford, School of Geography & the Environment (SoGE), Cultural Geography (2008), first class
National University of Singapore (NUS), Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
Environmental Anthropology (of Southeast Asia), Anglophone Literature, and Theatre Studies (2004), second-upper
Personal Data
I'm an environmental anthropologist and cultural geographer, with formative training in Anglophone literature and theater studies.
My ongoing ethnographies engage people, places, and multispecies entanglements in everyday life spanning archipelagic and littoral contexts across Southeast Asia and the east Caribbean. These works arise from multimodal encounters combining decolonial, posthumanist and feminist currents. I'm particularly interested in oceanic imaginaries and phenomenologies of the sea, urban political ecologies of infrastructure and the intersectionality of disaster, alongside interests in ecological hauntologies and futurities, folkloric memory, and figures of spectrality.
I have taught graduate seminars and courses in maritime anthropology, development sociology, academic wiriting, and qualitative research methods at the Universities of Bremen, Bonn, and Indonesia (UI). Between 2020 and 2023, I served as co-principal investigator of the second phase SPP 1889 project 'Towards Blue Urbanism for Sea Level Change Adaptation: Global Trajectories and Speculative Futuring in Island Southeast Asia' (BlueUrban). along with J. Herbeck (University of Bremen).
While weaving between worlds of academia and the third sector, I also have a background in international development having previously served at the CGIAR-WorldFish HQ (Penang), the Alola Foundation (Dili/Timor), the National Youth Council (Singapore), the IUCN (Colombo), and the UNFCCC Secretariat (Bonn).
Books
Amoo-Adare, E. and R. Siriwardane-de Zoysa (eds.). (2024) An Anthology of Non-Conformism: Rebel Wom!n Words, Ways and Wonders , New York: DIO Press.
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R., KEY Low, N. Abdullah, AK Hornidge (eds.) (2022) Coastal Urbanities: Mobilities, Meanings, Maneuverrings . Leiden: Brill.
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. (2018) Fishing, Mobility and Settlerhood: Coastal Socialities in Postwar Sri Lanka , Cham: Springer.
Journal articles
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R., V. Sreekanta, V., D. Mwambari, S. Mehta, and M. Majumder. (2023) The Unruly Arts of Ethnographic Refusal: Power, Politics, Performativity, in FENNIA: International Journal of Geography 201(2), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.121832 .
Godamunne V, Abdeen AJ, Siriwardane-de Zoysa R (2022). Shored curfews: Constructions of pandemic islandness in contemporary Sri Lanka. Maritime Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s40152-022-00262-5
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R., Sondang, IF, and Ganda Purnama, A. (2021). Opto-Haptic Fieldwork Encounters in Pandemic Southeast Asia. Fieldsights , Members' Voices. Available online: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/opto-haptic-fieldwork-encounters-in-pandemic-southeast-asia .
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R., Schöne T, Herbeck, J., Illigner, J., Haghighi, M., Simarmata, H., Porio, E., Rovere, A., and Hornidge, AK. (2021). The 'wickedness' of governing land subsidence: Policy perspectives from urban Southeast Asia. PLOS ONE , https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250208 .
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. (2021). Decolonizing Seascapes: Imaginaries and Absences on an Island Hub. Postcolonial Interventions VI(I), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4483976
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. & Herbeck, J. (2020). Futuring 'Blue Urbanisms': Pluralising the Littoral in Urban Southeast Asia, International Sociological Association E-symposium. Available online: https://esymposium.isaportal.org/resources/resource/futuring-blue-urbanisms/
Hornidge AK, Herbeck J; Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. and Flitner, M. (2020). Epistemic Mobilities: Following Sea-Level Change Adaptation Practices in Southeast Asian Cities, American Behavioral Scientist , DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764220947764
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. Beyond the Wall: Dyking as an object of everyday governance in the Bay of Manila . Marine Policy , Vol. 112, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2019.103661
Viana Inés G, Siriwardane-de Zoysa R, Willette Demian A, Gillis Lucy G (2019.) Exploring how non-native seagrass species could provide essential ecosystems services: a perspective on the highly invasive seagrass Halophila stipulacea in the Caribbean Sea, Biological Invasions , DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-019-01924-y
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R., Fitrinitia, IS and Herbeck, J. (2018) Watery Incursions : The Securitization of Everyday 'Flood Cultures' in Metro Manila and Coastal Jakarta, International Quarterly for Asian Studies , Vol 49 (1-2) : 105-126.
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. and Hornidge, AK. (2016) Putting Lifeworlds at Sea: Studying Meaning-making in Marine Research, Frontiers in Marine Science 8, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2016.00197
Weeratunge N, Béné C, Siriwardane R, Charles A, Johnson D, Allison EH, Nayak P, Badjeck MC. (2014) Small-scale fisheries through the wellbeing lens . Fish and Fisheries , 15(2):255-279.
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. (forthcoming) Following currents: Oceanic and littoral Sri Lanka. in Ruwanpura et al. (eds). Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Sri Lanka , London: Routledge.
Simarmata, HA, Rafliana I, Herbeck H, Siriwardane-de Zoysa R. (2023). Futuring 'Nusantara': Detangling Indonesia's Modernist Archipelagic Imaginaries . in S. Partelow et al. (eds). Ocean Governance: Pasts, Presents, Futures . Cham: Springer.
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. and A-K. Hornidge (2022) Tidal Turns: Coastal Urbanities in Island Southest Asia, in Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R., K.E.Y Low, N. Abdullah and A-K Hornidge (eds), Coastal Urbanities, Leiden: Brill.
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. and Salleh, J. (2022) Sanded: Sedimented Pasts and Shored Futures in ´Outer´ Singapore, in Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R., KEY Low, N. Abdullah and A-K Hornidge (eds), Coastal Urbanities, Leiden: Brill.
Herbeck, J., Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. (2022). Transformations of Urban Coastal Nature(s): Meanings and Paradoxes of Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Adaptation in Southeast Asia . In: Misiune, I., Depellegrin, D., Egarter Vigl, L. (eds) Human-Nature Interactions . Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01980-7_6
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. (2022) Islanded Hauntings: Sri Lanka's Seascape Imaginaries and Mythico-histories of the Insular. in S. Dey and A. Nirmal. (eds). Histories, Myths and Decolonial Interventions: A Planetary Resistance , London/Delhi: Routledge.
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, R. and Amoo-Adare, E. (2021) The Bi-polar Waterfront: Paradoxes of Shoreline Placemaking in Contemporary Accra and Colombo, In: P. Godfrey and M. Buchanan, eds. Global [Im]-Possibilities: Exploring the Paradoxes of Just Sustainabilities , London: Bloomsbury.
Schulz, Karsten and Siriwardane, Rapti (2016) The Risk Frontier: Social Transformations in Rural and Peri-urban Ghana , in Adaptation to Climate Change and Variability in Rural West Africa , In: J. Yaro and J. Hesselberg (Eds.), Berlin: Springer, pp. 171-189.
(in partnership with Mangrove Maniacs, Bonaire; Dakshin Foundation, India; Mingas por el Mare, Ecuador; Bremen Dyke Association, DE; and Mercy Corps, Indonesia)
(June, 2021).
Advisors: Prof. Conrad Schetter (University of Bonn) & Prof. Aram Ziai (University of Kassel), Tutor: Katja Mielke (BICC, Bonn)
Advisors: Dr. Jaime Lorimer (Oxford) & Prof. Andrew Barry (KCL)