ABOUT US
This project began over numerous conversations between Elyse Stanes and Savita Vijayakumar while travelling the winding coastal roads of Tamil nadu and Goa. In the field, between visits to fishing habours, ice factories and salt pans through a joint immersive learning initiative between Earth CoLab and the University of Wollongong, uniting 30 students across 2023-2024 to explore oceanic worlds through art-science methods. This collaboration revealed their shared commitment to critical, field-based research—combining Savita’s ethnographic engagement with coastal communities and social movements in South India with Elyse’s focus on the material politics of infrastructure.
TEAM
ELYSE STANES
Research Fellow, Geography and Sustainability, School of Social Sciences,
University of Wollongong
Elyse Stanes is an early career critical social and cultural geographer whose research examines how persistent materials and everyday infrastructures circulate through social and ecological systems while remaining politically invisible. Through ethnographic and interdisciplinary approaches, Elyse maps relationships between material flows, environmental impacts, and social practices. Her work on refrigerants and cooling systems (Stanes et al. 2022; Daly et al. 2023) documents how these potent greenhouse gases function as sites where labour, energy, and ecological costs are systematically obscured despite their climate impacts. Drawing on expertise in mixed-methods research and visual analysis, Elyse develops innovative methodologies that make visible what conventional approaches miss. Elyse's research on plastic pollution and synthetic textiles (Stanes 2019; Stanton et al. 2023; McKay et al. 2020; Stanes and Gibson 2017) reveals how persistent materials create embodied entanglements connecting distant places through invisible flows. Elyse brings expertise for tracing how seemingly neutral technical systems organise social and ecological relations across scales.
SAVITA VIJAYAKUMAR
Co-Founder Earth CoLAb
Independent Researcher (Political Ecology)
Savita Vijayakumar is a political ecologist based in South India. For over 12 years, Savita has worked closely with small-scale fisherworkers’ (SSF) unions and associations in South/South-East Asia and Africa, examining how power and knowledge shape capitalist imaginaries of oceans as frontiers. Her documentation of political agency and resistance mounted by coastal societies confronting neoliberal conservation and large development infrastructure driven by Blue Economy initiatives provides critical insights for this project.