Dr John Childs

John is particularly interested in the political ecological dimensions of natural resource extraction, including the study of minerals, precious metals, oil and gas. For the last few years, he has been focused on the political geography of deep-sea mining (DSM). He has held an ESRC Future Research Leaders fellowship which investigated the geo-politics of DSM, broadly conceived. Through an approach conceptually grounded at the interface of critical geography, political ecology and resource anthropology, he is interested in how the seabed has emerged as a new political terrain of struggle. Moving beyond geopolitical approaches that understand the world largely in the narrow terms of interstate relations, his work seeks to understand the seabed’s politics as being produced by a relational congregation of socio-natural forces. To this end, I have published specific analyses of 1) the temporalities of deep sea mining; 2) a corporate anthropology of a DSM firm and its strategies; 3) the impacts of DSM upon indigenous communities and the political potential of art to counter-narrate the seabed.