Agenda

Plastic Odysseys: Amphibious Encounters with a Modern Material


Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko
Hakubi Center for Advanced Research
Kyoto University

3 December 2025

Ca' Foscari Zattere (CFZ), Tesa 1
Fondamenta Zattere, Dorsoduro 1392, 30123 Venezia

Abstract:

The accelerating speed of capitalism over the last seventy years has relied on material support, best exemplified by capitalism’s own wunderkind material: plastics.
Although an increasing number of plastics have been made to be used and discarded as if they were essentially ephemeral, transforming the decayed matter of the past into the mass production of plastics has created a material that stubbornly persists.
This talk will look at how people on Christmas Island, an Australian external territory, creatively engage plastic marine debris in relation to the technologies and economies that plastics have co-produced.
It will look specifically at how the movements of animals, people, and ancestors and ghosts are disrupted and supported by the use and presence of plastics.
Engaging the ambivalences that many people have towards the plastics, it will look at how plastic items hitch rides on ocean currents, tie nations together through economic and material relations, and are embedded within religious traditions and cosmological understandings.
By looking at how people use and are inundated with plastic items, it will investigate how the inhabitants of Christmas Island view their autonomy and/or enmeshment, both economically and temporally, in a world where plastics effortlessly cross boundaries, through trade networks and with the currents of the Indian Ocean.