The Trans-actional Ocean Excessive Mobilities and Immersive Temporalities at Sea

In an attempt to critically interrogate the relationship between critical ocean geographies and the situated knowledges of decolonial, postcolonial, Black, feminist, Indigenous, queer, posthumanist, and new materialist studies, this special issue presents a deep immersion into the oceanic as a means for interpreting the positionalities and productions of academic knowledge. By engaging with multiple valences of critical ocean geographies, the articles in this special issue go beyond opening up alternative ways of thinking about space, relationalities, perspectives, and the coloniality of geography. They also open up a breach in the very modes of academic knowledge production that obscures, erases, and selects which seas and which knowledges about the sea are recognized. Thus, by engaging with the sea as a pivotal space for understanding our contemporary world and its accumulation of an ever present past, this special introduces the concept of a trans-actional ocean, an ocean whose excessive mobilities and immersive temporalities clash, witness, and interrogate.