Coalition Science: Bridging Imaginaries Between Collocated Communities in the Polar Oceans

Analysing ethnographic data from observations and interviews with polar scientists, this article builds on feminist techno-science, queer ecologies, and indigenous Science and Technology Studies (STS) to offer urgent critiques and useable techniques for creating more resilient and less harmful knowledge infrastructures. This article proposes ‘coalition science’ as a framework for multiple invested parties to share locations and produce knowledge together, complementing decolonial and feminist endeavours. The commitments of coalitions that we detail here reimagine communication pathways between scientists and other stakeholders who imagine and interact with the ocean in different ways. As this article demonstrates, when ocean scientists do attend to community engagement and co-design, they tend to invest in innovation rather than maintenance (what we call techno-scientific imaginaries). Feminist and indigenous theories of co-location and co-design push back against this asymmetrical attention to the new and help us see the urgent need to develop lasting coalitions as infrastructures continuously need repair. Coalition draws attention to new imaginaries based on justice, communication, and relationships. This article shows four critical moments that can put a coalition-centred imaginary into immediate practice.