Postdoctoral Research Fellow Profile: Multibeing Seas: Agencies of Resistance and Response

 'Multibeing Rockpool', Fieldwork series: Multibeing Ocean Relations. Yaegl Country NSW

‘Multibeing Rockpool’, Fieldwork series: Multibeing Ocean Relations. Yaegl Country NSW

Susan Reid is a postdoctoral fellow at UBC’s Faculty of Critical and Creative Studies working with Dr. Astrida Neimanis. She researches multibeing ontologies with a focus on human-ocean relationships, extractivism, and justice. Susan holds a PhD from the University of Sydney, an LlM in International Law from the Australian National University and a Master of Design from the University of Technology Sydney.

Susan shared with us some information about her research and affiliation with UBC Okanagan.

How is your postdoc connected to UBCO?

My postdoc research is transdisciplinary and fits well within the interdisciplinary environment of UBCO’s Faculty of Critical and Creative Studies. This is particularly so given FCCS’s program focus on the critical role of humanities in analysing environmental sustainability issues and their intersections across climate change, and environmental and social justice. I am also excited to be working with the feminist environmental humanities research hub, the FEEeLed Lab–an important hub for interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, including ethical frameworks and approaches for decolonizing environmental humanities research. Given the still emerging nature of critical ocean humanities scholarship, I look forward to exchanging strategies for building scholarly and activist communities of interest and workshopping elements of my research with FEELed colleagues.

Explain your research and how will you be able to conduct this research at UBCO?

I research ‘multibeing’ ontologies, drawing on feminist, queer and decolonising theory. ‘Multibeing’ is a term I created to describe the relational conditions of materiality, phenomenology, sociality, and temporality which constitute embodied being. To date, I’ve concentrated on how this plays out across human-ocean relationships, extractivism, and justice.

The broad framework of multibeing agency encompasses marine phenomena, other-than human marine constituencies, and human agents such as advocates, Indigenous custodians, rescuers, and artists. Specifically though, I am interested in how ocean agency functions in the context of extractive sites and events, and its potential (or not) for extending relational concepts of justice. How might the ocean’s responses to extractive violences be re-imagined as creative acts of resistance, refusal, and re-generation? How too might the work of ocean advocates, defenders, community responders, Indigenous stewards, and artists be understood as modes of ocean agency.

Place-based ocean research is difficult beyond shorelines and near waters. Exploring modes of ocean agency relies on scientific mediations. For this project, I am also working with contemporary art foundation TBA21 to investigate how artists conceptualise ocean agency. Relatedly, I am collaborating with an international coalition of scholars, artists and community activists to re-imagine ocean relations and agency in the context of deep seabed mining. We’ve recently co-founded the Deep Current Collective and will present panel discussions and curated events at the International Seabed Authority’s 2025 session. This exciting international collaboration connects UBCO’s environmental humanities research with University of Southampton, University of Vienna, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Harvard.

Why did you choose that topic, and what difference do you hope your research will make?

Like so many others, I’m concerned about state and corporate investments in the extractive activities harming our biospheric relations. Through previous research I became aware of just how much governments and corporations depend on the ocean’s agentic, relational qualities to somehow rebound, repopulate, recover and repair from the extractive harms that they cause. Yet, as a tactic, extractive regimes deploy legal and policy frameworks which represent the ocean through passive, reductive terms that deny this very agency.  I have been struck too by how much governments and corporations responsible for ecological devastations, rely on the labors and commitments of human volunteers, Indigenous rangers, conservation and research organisations to perform clean up or rescue work–whether cleaning up after oil spills, retrieving ghost nets from the ocean, or rescuing entangled or injured marine animals. My research reveals these paradoxes and denials in ways that can unsettle dominating extractive representations. It will extend multibeing ontological insights and offer new approaches for imagining concepts of, or adjacent to, ocean agency.

What are your plans after you complete the postdoc?

To secure ongoing research opportunities and funding so that I can continue building and contributing to environmental philosophy, ocean humanities, ocean (legal) humanities and ecological justice fields. To continue working with others in building scholarly and creative communities working to imagine less violent relations with multibeing worlds.

Susan Reid

About Susan Reid

Susan Reid’s transdisciplinary practice draws on expertise across cultural studies, environmental humanities, environmental activism, international ocean law, writing, and contemporary arts. Prior to joining UBCO, Susan was a key researcher within the ARC funded ‘Extracting the Ocean’ project, at the University of Sydney. Their professional experiences also encompass senior roles across arts management, curation, cultural development, and intellectual property law.

Susan’s ancestry includes Anglo-Celtic and mixed European settler heritage. She was born between the Solomon Sea and Pacific Ocean, on the main island of what is now known as the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. In Canada, she lives and works nomadically on unceded territories of the Syilx/Okanagan nation (Kelowna), and the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam nations (Vancouver).