Fischel, Sarah; (2025) Caring for Coral in Bonaire: a Multispecies and Political Ecology Analysis. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Marine species and ecosystems are vital to life on Earth but are increasingly threatened by anthropogenic activities. Marine spaces have also received less attention within the social sciences than terrestrial examples. In my thesis, I have contributed to this area by exploring coral, a marine animal which is on the edge, both of human understanding and ecologically, with scientists predicting that coral reefs could be extinct by 2050. To investigate coral and coral restoration, I carried out six months of ethnographic fieldwork on Bonaire, a Caribbean island surrounded by coral. I have drawn on two theoretical approaches, firstly political ecology, which investigates the relationships between economics, politics and nature and, secondly, ‘more-than- human’ and ‘multispecies’ work, which explores the lives, agency and entanglements of more-than-humans. In my first analysis chapter, I address the materiality of coral, illustrating how its relationships with other actors such as salt, forests and sand, have shaped Bonaire over time and how these relationships are fracturing in the present day as Bonaire’s coastal areas transform. In the next chapter, I analyse emotions such as ecological nostalgia and hope which are expressed in narratives relating to coral decline, as a way to further understand human-coral relationships and how they vary between groups of people. In the final analysis chapter, I consider varied practices of care for coral, such as coral gardening. I explore how these practices are interwoven with different multispecies affective encounters and how some forms of care and encounter are prioritised. I conclude that coral is entangled with multiple actors, human and more-than-human, which together shape, and are shaped by, Bonaire's wider political, economic and historical context. This shared vulnerability and complexity requires cross disciplinary understandings of coral and multiple forms of care.

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