Seaweed Saves the World? is the text and photo ethnography produced from my doctoral research in social anthropology with visual media at the University of Manchester’s Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (GCVA), with a year as a visiting researcher at the Scottish Association of Marine Science (SAMS).

According to recent media coverage, seaweed cultivation is a revolutionary practice that could save the world: it can solve world hunger, sequester carbon from the atmosphere, reduce reliance on fossil fuels and replace inorganic fertilisers. This has led to an increased international interest in seaweed as a crop, with a nascent UK industry emerging on the west coast of Scotland. However, although seaweed cultivation is new to the area, other regional seaweed industries have come and gone over the centuries.

Using the notion of tidalanalysis, this thesis asks what happens and what matters when crop cultivation is taken into the sea for the first time. It attends to the more-than-human, spatiotemporal rhythms and flows of the coastscape – a meeting point of land and sea which is more than the sum of its parts – around the town of Oban, a potential hub for the new industry. Based on ethnographic research with marine scientists, seaweed farmers and others, the thesis reveals that the processes of growing seaweed require negotiation and compromise with the rhythms of the seaweed organism, the seawaters in which they are immersed, and wider human and non-human coastscapes across which the work takes place. In doing so, it improves anthropological understandings of the blue economy and resource extraction in the Anthropocene.

The photographs below are from the photo-essay chapter of the thesis. They were made possible by the materials and elemental rhythms of the Argyll coastscape (a seaweed-based photographic developer; sun-printed cyanotypes) and inspired by the entangled origins of social anthropology, marine science, photography and seaweed (Anna Atkins’s cyanotype impressions of British algae; the anthropological photography of the Challenger Expedition, whose scientific crew member John Murray set up SAMS’s forerunner; and the early use of cameras by Alfred Cort Haddon, the former marine zoologist who introduced fieldwork to anthropology). It also features archival images of previous seaweed industries in the region.