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RASMUS RODINELIUSSEN, 2024, Underwater Worlds: An Ethnography of Waste, 

Pollution, and Marine Life, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 248 pp., ISBN  978-3-031-63372-0  

Keywords: Aquabiopolitics, Environmental Anthropology, Marine Pollution, Scuba Diving, 

Underwater Ethnography, Waste 

 

Rasmus Rodineliussen’s Underwater Worlds is a vivid and thought-provoking ethnography that 

plunges into the complex entanglements of underwater waste, pollution, marine life, and our 

recognitions. At a time when oceanic crises are more urgent than ever—especially in light of the 

2024 global coral bleaching event—this book offers a timely reflection on how we manage and 

respond to human-induced changes in marine ecosystems. While it doesn’t focus specifically on 

coral reefs, it sheds light on the practical, multispcecies efforts in navigate the broader impacts of 

climate and oceanic transformation. 

 

Bridging environmental anthropology, political ecology, and science and technology studies 

(STS), Underwater Worlds contributes to critical conversations about waste, contamination, and 

the multispecies politics of water. Through immersive ethnographic work in scientific expedition 

and laboratory practices with marine scientists, and interactions with trash divers in Sweden, Brazil 

and Thailand, Rodineliussen weaves a compelling narrative. He captures the material, emotional, 

and political dimensions of waste in aquatic environments, showing how scientific practices, 

technologies, materilaities and multiscpecies engagements with the ocean shape our understanding 

of marine ecologies. The ultimate aim, he proposed, is to explore ‘how waste and pollution in the 

underwater world can be rendered visible, knowable, and relatable to humans’ (p.4).  

 

Reading this book as an anthropologist and diver myself, I found it deeply resonant, especially the 

experience of submerging oneself into an environment that is both unknown and yet intimately 

connected to human actions (Sangkhamanee 2024). Rodineliussen captures the paradoxes of the 



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underwater world—the invisibility, the fragility, and the unsettling evidence of human negligence. 

The embodied sensation of moving through near-zero visibility, touching objects before seeing 

them, and the eerie silence of the depths are vividly brought to life in his text. 

 

Rodineliussen’s engagement with “aquabiopolitics” emerges as a central analytical framework, 

drawing from Foucault’s biopolitics and extending it into the submerged spaces of marine, 

nonhuman governance. The concept underscores how marine life, from jellyfish to microbes, is 

enrolled in human projects of environmental management, technological intervention, and 

ecological conservation and care. This aquabiopolitics, as Rodineliussen argued, is a ‘politization 

of marine life’ wherein provide a space of legitimization for humans ‘to kill or let some life die in 

favor of other (human) life’ (p. 30). This conceptual lens enriches broader anthropological debates 

on human-nonhuman relations by shifting attention to submerged ecologies, challenging terrestrial 

biases (Jue 2020, Raycraft 2020) in social theory where land-based politics often centered around 

the governability and exploitation over other, and among, humans. 

 

The book is structured in two parts. The first section focuses on marine scientists’ engagements 

with underwater ecologies, detailing their methods of technologically mediating the oceanic 

unknown. This portion is particularly illuminating in its discussion of how scientific instruments 

and sensor technologies render pollution visible. Chapters on sediment sampling and the 

“plastisphere” illustrate how scientific knowledge production is itself an intervention in aquatic 

life-worlds, revealing how contamination is both detected and constituted through material and 

epistemic practices. Rodineliussen’s argument that these technological mediations not only map 

pollution but also actively shape the epistemological frameworks through which we understand 

marine environments is particularly insightful. He suggests that scientific tools and marine 

materials such as sediments do not merely reveal an already-existing pollution crisis and the 

process of slow violence (Nixon 2011) of human activities; these human-technological 

affoardances co-produce the very nature of what is considered pollution, making waste legible to 

governance structures and conservation efforts. 

 

The second part of the book shifts to trash scuba divers—environemtal activists who remove waste 

from Stockholm’s waters, navigating murky and often dangerous conditions. Here, Rodineliussen 



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offers ethnographic descriptions of these divers’ embodied, sensorial engagements with 

submerged waste. His firsthand accounts of diving in “café latte water”(p. 2-3)—a term referring 

to the highly polluted, low-visibility conditions—capture the sensory and affective dimensions of 

underwater labor. The ethnography shines in these moments, detailing how divers and rope pullers 

physically encounter waste, navigate unseen hazards, and bring discarded objects to the surface. 

By analyzing the labor of trash divers, Rodineliussen advances a broader argument about the 

material politics of waste: these divers do not merely extract waste from underwater landscapes 

but also challenge dominant narratives of environmental responsibility. Their work exposes the 

contradictions of so-called sustainable societies, revealing the unseen accumulations of industrial 

and consumer detritus beneath the surface. This, in turn, raises critical scrutiny about the thresholds 

of toxicity being dumped and accumulated in the water. Aquabiopolitics comes into play here: in 

Stockholm, waste and toxicity are deemed acceptable as long as specific toxicants remain below 

harmful levels for humans. However, this standard does not necessarily extend to marine 

organisms, for whom exposure to hazardard materials may already be altering underwater 

ecosystems—all to sustain human activities. Another chapter examines how the Rena Mälaren 

trash-diving group makes underwater waste visible to the public through installations and media 

campaigns. By engaging sensory experiences—sight, touch, and smell—the chapter highlights 

how waste in water represents slow violence, accumulating harm over time. Rodineliussen argues 

that shifting perspectives from land to underwater is essential for rethinking human relationships 

with marine environments 

 

A particularly compelling chapter juxtaposes trash diving in Sweden with similar initiatives in 

Brazil and Thailand, highlighting how localized waste ecologies intersect with global circuits of 

pollution and conservation. Rodineliussen’s inclusion of these comparative cases underscores the 

transnational dynamics of marine pollution and community-led responses, situating his 

ethnography within broader global debates on environmental practices. The chapter compares 

trash diving efforts in Sweden, Brazil, and Thailand, emphasizing how waste in water is a global 

issue. It explores how the Swedish trash-diving group expands its collaborations and  international 

initiatives with Project AWARE and Trash Hero, highlighting the different environmental and 

social conditions that shape trash-diving practices. Rodineliussen argues that while water pollution 



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is universal, the materiality and sensory experience of waste differ across locations, influencing 

how communities engage with conservation efforts 

 

One of the book’s strengths is its methodological innovation. By conducting sensorial, embodied 

“underwater ethnography,” Rodineliussen challenges conventional fieldwork practices, 

demonstrating the possibilities of submersion as an ethnographic technique. This approach 

resonates with recent anthropological experiments in affective methods in underwater studies 

(Sangkhamanee 2025), positioning Underwater Worlds as a methodological intervention as much 

as a theoretical one. As someone who has grappled with the methodological challenges of 

researching underwater environments, I appreciate Rodineliussen’s efforts to translate the sensory 

and affective experiences of diving into ethnographic knowledge. He invites scholars to consider 

how fieldwork might be transformed when our sensory faculties are reoriented. 

 

Underwater Worlds makes it an essential read for those interested in marine anthropology and the 

politics of environmental contamination. Rodineliussen’s work reminds us that the underwater is 

not merely a passive receptacle for human waste but a dynamic, contested space where life, matter, 

sensibility, and politics coalesce in unexpected ways. 

 

References 

 

Jue, Melody. 2020. Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater. Durham and London: Duke  

University Press.  

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Canbridge and London:  

Harvard University Press.  

Raycraft, Justin. 2020. “Seeing from Below: Scuba Diving and the Regressive Cyborg”.  

Anthropology and Humanism, 45: 301-321. 

Sangkhamanee, Jakkrit. 2024. Humanity in Symbiosis: Lessons from the Deep. Backchannel.  

The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). 

_______. 2025. “Diving into Underwater Anthropocene: Vital Materiality and the Becoming of a  

Shipwreck” in Southern Anthropocenes, edited by Casper Bruun Jensen. London & New 

York: Routledge.  

 

 

Jakkrit Sangkhamanee is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Chulalongkorn University, 

Thailand, specializing in STS and environmental anthropology. His research explores water (river 

and ocean) politics, infrastructure, and the entanglements of technology and nature in Southeast 

Asia. As an advanced diver and ethnographer, he engages with multispecies ethnography and 



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speculative approaches to anthropology. His works contribute to discussions on environmental 

governance, material politics, and ontological transformations in the Anthropocene. 

 

 

 

 

© 2025 Jakkrit Sangkhamanee 

 


