Discerning ocean plastics: Activist, scientific, and artistic practices

For almost 50 years scientists have been drawing attention to marine plastics, working to increase what we know about their incidence and impacts. However, how we come to know things is just as important as what we know. How do oceanic plastics become understood and how does this influence what we decide to do about them? Drawing upon discard studies and cultural geographies, this paper details processes of understanding and problematising marine debris by considering the practices of: an activist working with Indigenous communities to track and manage discarded fishing gear, a scientist investigating the influence of plastics in the lives of sea turtles, and Indigenous artists using oceanic debris as their material. Rather than categorising these knowledge as either lay or scientific, creating a sense of opposition, the concept of traces – material, immaterial, methodological – is employed to foreground the contingency and multiplicity involved. In this way, insight is gained about the materials, embodiments, affects and techniques involved in producing knowledge about oceanic plastics, as well as about how responses to this detritus become articulated and shared with wider publics.