Ocean Visions: The Impact of Private Oceanographic Vessels and Documentary Making on Ocean Science Governance and Research

Ocean science is no longer the sole domain of public research institutes and their vessels. Private oceanographic vessels are increasingly able to influence its governance and research practices. The business model of private vessels relies on producing wildlife documentaries that feature telegenic discoveries and charismatic animals, alongside ocean scientists themselves. While their vessels actively enable scientific research, companies like OceanX also ensure the steady production of striking moving images for wildlife documentaries, such as BBC’s Blue Planet. OceanVisions aims to understand how these private vessels affect the daily governance of ocean science research, and specifically how their emphasis on documentary film production shapes ocean scientists’ objectives and routines.

By foregrounding practices of visual content production for scientific analysis and documentaries, OceanVisions explores everyday governance arrangements in ocean science and analyses how scientists adapt their knowledge creation practices to the requirements of film-making onboard oceanographic vessels. This research project utilises an innovative research design, conducting a comparative ethnography between one public research vessel, owned by the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, and one private vessel, owned by OceanX. This interdisciplinary project – which brings together studies on the governance of science with the anthropology of science – will be carried out at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, a leading institute focusing on scientific research and its connections to technology, innovation, and society. The project will also benefit from a secondment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.