ZMT - Leibniz Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung

The UN Law of the Sea grants coastal nations ocean jurisdictions out to 200 nautical miles from shore. This requires a formalization of a land/sea divide along the low-water line to generate the legally defined "baseline", from which offshore jurisdictions are then measured. This approximation of the coastline creates meaning through social-material practices of boundary making, as it enact cuts that fashion land and sea spaces into discrete entities. In Aotearoa New Zealand, this enabled the claiming of all submerged lands and associated resources as property of the national government. The foreshore has become the central focus for political actions over clashing worldviews, as indigenous Māori cosmologies contend their sovereignty as extending from mountains to sea. Ongoing attempts to issue seabed mining permits for the extraction of iron from the sandy seafloor have met with coalitions of resistance. This talk considers baselines as a political technology, the calculative apparatus that enacts cuts to refashion lively ocean worlds into divisible spaces and objects, in direct opposition to Māori relational cosmology and tribal holdings.

Katherine Sammler is a human geographer with previous training in physics and atmospheric sciences. Her research explores how social and political regimes make sense of, and produce knowledge about, oceans and atmospheres. Her doctoral work at The University of Arizona investigated proposed seabed mining projects in New Zealand and the broader Pacific, tracing alliances formed along extraction interests and environmental activism. Current projects include research on Spaceport America and contested offplanet access, the cultural and legal aspects of fog and rainwater capture, and colonial power relations with science and island landscapes atop Hawaiian mountaintops. She is currently working as an assistant professor at California State University Maritime Academy in the department of Global Studies & Maritime Affairs.