December 2024: Juliette Kon Kam King defended her Ph.D. thesis in Montpellier
On the 17th of December 2024, Juliette Kon Kam King defended the Ph.D. thesis Trac(k)ing Fishe(r)s in the South Pacific: Surveillances in and of a More-than-Human Ocean that she started as part of the SOCPacific research project in 2018 and submitted in October 2024.
The defence took place in Montpellier at the University Paul Valéry before a jury involving (in alphabetical order) Annette Breckwoldt (ZMT), Christian Bueger (University of Copenhagen), Elodie Fache (IRD), Michael Flitner (University of Bremen), Pierre Gautreau (Sorbonne University) and Estienne Rodary (IRD).
Following a brief presentation of her work and main research results, Juliette addressed the jury’s questions and eventually passed the examination with the grade summe cum laude (German system).
Summary of the thesis:
(available at: https://theses.fr/s215389 & https://shs.hal.science/tel-04911872)
This thesis examines the policies and practices of tuna fisheries surveillance in the South Pacific region in relation to the territorialisation of the oceans. It conducts a socio-historical analysis of surveillance and territory-making in offshore spaces, understood as vast, distant, difficult-to-access, labile and more-than-human environments. At the crossroads of environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and surveillance studies, this thesis draws on a multi-level, multi-sited qualitative investigation of Fiji and New Caledonia’s tuna industries and their surveillance.
The thesis retraces the development of some main tuna fisheries surveillance apparatuses since the 1950s and investigates their practical functioning. It analyses the collection, processing and circulation of data and how they enable as much as they constrain offshore surveillance. In so doing, the thesis highlights the role of surveillance infrastructures, and in particular of fishing, oceanographic and military vessels, which condition physical and cognitive access to offshore worlds. It describes offshore surveillance as largely opportunistic, distributed and delegated (particularly to its own subjects of surveillance), and as relying on multipotent boundary apparatuses serving multiple and sometimes antagonistic scientific, regulatory, coercive, security or commercial objectives. This fluid approach to surveillance results from a pragmatic strategy to rationalise limited resources and circumvent the constraining rigidity of surveillance infrastructures, and conditions the very possibility of offshore surveillance. In turn, the intertwining of various forms of surveillance is a source of frictions that refracts the territorial ambitions projected from land to sea. It also produces specific lock-ins and forms of ignorance and inaction. The thesis thus proposes a reflection on human-ocean relations through and under the effect of their surveillance, on the specificities of offshore spaces and territories, and on issues of governance of environmental surveillance infrastructures.
