Oceans are often understood as hypernatural spaces, zones of the nonhuman or of the on-beyond-human. But human enterprise is thickly stirred into both the notion and the substance of the sea. And oceanography, as the science of the ocean realm, is very much informed by cultural histories, politics, economics, aesthetics, and more. My work in the anthropology of science tracks how this is so, following ocean researchers at sea, in the lab, and at the computer screen as they craft new portraits of the marine world. My 2009 book, /Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas/ is a study of marine biologists working in realms usually out of sight and reach: the microscopic world, the deep sea, and oceans outside national boundaries. This book charts how marine microbes are entangled with debates about the origin of life, climate change, property in the ocean commons, Indigenous sovereignty, the politics of remote sensing, and the possibility of life on other worlds. My 2016 book, /Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond/, reaches out from oceanography, while ever keeping the sea in mind. I investigate how contemporary scientists — biologists, oceanographers, audio researchers — are rethinking such foundational concepts as “life,” “water,” and “sound.” These concepts, all of which manifest where nature and culture meet, are at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. And in the age of synthetic biology, transforming ocean chemistry and climate, and new techniques of sonification, all of them are being stretched toward new significations. The book offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, artificial cochlea — sounding the changing theories and practices of today’s sciences

My book in progress, /A Book of Waves/, centers on how scientists measure, monitor, and model ocean waves — through at-sea fieldwork, in lab-based wave-tank research, and in digital simulation. While waves have a manifest materiality to them, they often become apprehensible through abstractions, whether these are theories, equations, approximations, or cultural narratives deployed by scientists, meteorologists, fishers, surfers, or others. Beyond offering an account of wave science as it is done today — particularly in the United States, the Netherlands, Japan, and Bangladesh — the book will also examine how waves have been represented in mythology, surf culture, music and sound art, film, painting, Indigenous activisms, Black Atlantic history, environmental monitoring, human rights forensics, and more. Waves, nowadays often experienced as emissaries of ocean-borne transformations — of futures (sea-level rise, intensifying storms) — also carry memory, variously ecological, climatic, sublime, traumatic. Waves, I will suggest, may also be understood as media, as material forms that relay messages to scientists and others who bear witness to their unfoldings.