Camelia Dewan - Excess Maritime Toxic Flows: Shipbreaking in coastal Bangladesh

Lecture abstract

Excess Maritime Toxic Flows: Shipbreaking in coastal Bangladesh
This lecture series examines how excess is a striking feature of consumption, production, circulation and discard in late capitalist environments. In this lecture I discuss shipbreaking in coastal Bangladesh as a form of excess maritime toxic flows. Ship recycling constitutes an essential part of the global maritime industry – it removes surplus ships from the market while making place for newer, and increasingly ‘green’ models. But, ships are filled with hazardous materials, when they are dismantled, toxic and health-harming substances leak into coastal wetlands ecologies of South Asia. Drawing on multi-scaled and multisited ethnographic fieldwork with shipbreaking workers and local fishing communities in Chattogram, Bangladesh as well as with shipbreaking yard owners, maritime consultants, and government officials, this paper conceptualizes toxic flows as a method to trace the lived experiences of those who are exposed to industrial pollution from shipbreaking. Excess maritime toxic flows draws attention to how shipbreaking with its local toxic leakages constitutes a form of “structural violence” where violence is built into the logic of accumulation strategies in the maritime industry. Lastly, I discuss Bangladesh’s recent reform work to comply with and ratify the International Maritime Organization’s Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships and its potential to contain excess maritime toxic flows.

About the lecturer

Camelia Dewan is Associate Professor (Docent) in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology and Environment from the University of London (SOAS/Birkbeck). As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo (2018–2023), she examined the socio-environmental effects of shipbreaking in Bangladesh for the RCN-funded “Life Cycle of Container Ship” project. She is the author of Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh (2021) –a 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize finalist. Dr Dewa is also the co-editor of two special issues: “Fluid Dispossessions” (Ethnos, 2024) and “Scaled Ethnographies of Toxic Flows” (Environment and Planning C, 2024).
ORCID-ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3377-2413. E-mail: camelia.dewan@antro.uu.se