Merdeka Agus Saputra

Human Geographer
Portrait Merdeka Agus Saputra
Photo: private

Contact

ed.bmfih@artupas.suga.akedrem

Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg (HIFMB)
Im Technologiepark 5
26129 Oldenburg

Publications

Team

Marine Governance

Status group

PhD

Research Area

Conservation and Management

Vita

2022 – today

PhD candidate at HIFMB/AWI, Oldenburg

2021 – 2022

Environmental policy translator in Fisheries Progress

2018 – 2019

Aquaculture governance relation in Alune Aqua

2016 2018

MSc student in Marine Governance Environmental Policy at Wageningen University and Research (WUR), the Netherlands

2011 – 2015

BSc student in Fisheries and Marine at Universitas Airlangga

Research Interests

My research interest lies in the intersection between science, technology, and human geography to understand how the tripartite produces specific knowledge to define who can or cannot access space and resources. With this interdisciplinary approach, I aim to deconstruct dominant narratives that portray landscape and seascape as empty spaces. This work is crucial and urgent because, in environmental regulatory intervention, governance actors often use colonial, hierarchical, and vertical approaches to control, manage, and regulate the environment without considering human and non-human relations in particular spaces (sea and land). In this way, this god’s view tends to occlude how the environmental regulations affect and are affected by humans and non-humans within the physical space. Thus, excluding humans and non-humans that experience and make a relation to the space, the regulatory intervention may instead result in environmental justice issues by privileging powerful governance actors’ interests in the space and resources over those who reside in the material site. Given this broad research interest and shared expertise, my work is associated with Kate Sammlers, former head of the Marine Political Ecology focus group. My current research project is called Benthic Geopolitics, funded by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). This research project aims to incorporate benthic relations (human, non-human, and seabed relations) in the current geopolitical thinking of the seabed. With this research project, I examine the seabed meaning-making in Indonesia from the perspectives of governance actors working in seabed mining, undersea cables, and undersea pipelines. My two papers from this project are still under review and ready for submission to peer-reviewed journals. 

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