Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa

Dr. Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa

Senior Scientist

Phone: +49 (0)421 23800 - 174

Fax: +49 (0)421 23800 - 30

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Office: Wiener Str. 7
28359 Bremen
Room: 5201 (2nd floor)

Research interests

- Oceanic imaginaries and eco-futures
- Multispecies and gendered ecologies in/of urban placemaking and protected area governance
- Urban political ecology and the after/lives of infrastructure
- Mobility, displacement/dispossession, and transoceanic circulations
- Anthropology of blue-green architecture and design
- Decolonial, hauntological, posthumanist, and critical development theories & praxes
- Visual-participatory methods and experimental ethnography

Geographic foci:
Island South and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Sri Lanka)
East Caribbean (Bonaire & Jamaica)

Past fieldwork:
Singapore (2003-2004), Cornwall; UK (2007/8); Dili, Timor-Leste (2006); Trincomalee, Sri Lanka (2011-2015), Penang, Malaysia (2017) ; Bonaire and Jamaica (2018); Jakarta, Singapore, and Metro Manila (2016-2020); Semarang, Pekalongan, and South Kalimantan (2022-2023)


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.

 

Book chapters
 

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.

 

Visual exhibitions organised:
 
With J. Herbeck, "Storying Sea Level Change in Land Southeast Asia", Ci:Kini Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia (September 2018)
With J. Herbeck, "Contested Coastal Worlds - Care and Conviviality in Coastal Life", Haus der Wissenschaft, Bremen, Germany (November 2022 - February 2023)
(in partnership with Mangrove Maniacs, Bonaire; Dakshin Foundation, India; Mingas por el Mare, Ecuador; Bremen Dyke Association, DE; and Mercy Corps, Indonesia)
 
 
Essays, book reviews, working papers & policy briefs
 
Sridhar, A., A. Jalais, R. Siriwardane-de Zoysa, S. Anantha (2022) The Indian Ocean Southern Collective: A Collaboratory for Postnormal Coastal Knowledge Production. Items: Insights from the Social Sciences. Available online: https://items.ssrc.org/crisis-and-collaboration-across-the-indian-ocean/the-indian-ocean-southern-collective/
Book review for Anthropos 115: 20): King, Tanya J., and Gary Robinson (eds.): At Home on the Waves. Human Habitation of the Sea from the Mesolithic to Today. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. 372 pp. ISBN 978-1-78920-142-0. (Studies in Environmental Anthropology and Ethnobiology, 24)
(June, 2021).
Godamunne, V. and Siriwardane-de Zoysa R. (2021). Between jab lines and pandemic orientalism in urban Sri Lanka, UCL Medical Anthropology blogs, https://medanthucl.com/2021/03/16/between-jab-lines-and-pandemic-orientalism-in-urban-sri-lanka/
Perrin, Sam and Rapti Siriwardane-de Zoysa (2017) Women in marine science: The efficacy of ecofeminist theory in the wake of historical critique, ZMT Working Paper No. 3, Bremen.
Schulz, K. and Siriwardane, R. (2015) Depoliticised and Technocratic? Normativity and the Politics of Transformative Adaptation. Earth System Governance Working Paper No. 33, Lund and Amsterdam.
Weerawardhana, C. and R. Siriwardane (2015) "Reis Mafia" in Colombo: Wahlkampf um das Präsidentenamt. Südasien, 35 (1), 91-97.
Siriwardane, R. (2014) War, Migration and Modernity: The Micro-politics of the Hijab in Northeastern Sri Lanka. ZEF Working Paper No. 127, Bonn.
Siriwardane, R. and Winands, S. (2013) Between hope and hype: Traditional knowledge(s) held by marginal communities. ZEF Working Paper No. 115, Bonn.
 
Theses
Siriwardane, Rapti (2015) 'Sambandam': Cooperation, Contestation and Coastal Lifeworlds in Postwar Sri Lanka, PhD dissertation, University of Bonn (summa cum laude), Center for Development Research/ZEF, University of Bonnn
Advisors: Prof. Conrad Schetter (University of Bonn) & Prof. Aram Ziai (University of Kassel), Tutor: Katja Mielke (BICC, Bonn)
Siriwardane, Rapti (2008) Utopias of Process: Re-envisioning Gendered Subjectivities among Eco-settlements in Southwest England, Masters thesis, School of Geography and the Environment/SoGE, University of Oxford.
Advisors: Dr. Jaime Lorimer (Oxford) & Prof. Andrew Barry (KCL)
Siriwardane, Rapti (2004) Shifting Terrains: Negotiating Boundaries between the ‘Natural’ and its Contrived in Urban Ecological Narratives in Singapore, Honours thesis, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore.  Advisor: Prof. Stephanie K. Rupp (CUNY)