This article examines how Deep Sea Mining (DSM) has been articulated and contested in Norway following the government’s January 2024 decision to initiate the opening of its Arctic seabed to mineral extraction. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2023 and 2025, I analyse how industry actors, state institutions, scientists, and civil society organisations mobilise narratives of urgency, necessity, and environmental responsibility to legitimize – or resist – this expansion of Norway’s extractive frontier. I argue that rather than representing a rupture with extractivism, DSM in Norway is best understood as a continuation of a longer extractive trajectory, rearticulated through the moral language of the green transition. To make this argument, I employ the concept of aquabiopolitics to analyse how marine life and environments are governed in ways that primarily serve human futures on land. I further show how temporal politics have a decisive role in sustaining DSM as both a moral and financial project.

The article centres on the idea of care in human attempts to remove microplastics from the water with the help of jellyfish bodies, asking: who is cared for, and who bears the cost for this care? It has recently come to light that jellyfish bodies have properties that can be utilized by humans to catch microplastics. This has led to an initiative to create filters for wastewater treatment plants that will use jellyfish bodies to catch microplastics from wastewater to mitigate the effects of human pollution. However, in the process of becoming products for various human uses (filters for wastewater plants, nutrients for agriculture, and even food), the jellyfish are killed. Humans thus seek to provide care for the underwater world by removing plastics, but to do so, they are using the bodies of jellyfish themselves.

This introduction frames a special issue exploring human-ocean creature relationships through the lens of care. The authors examine how care practices for marine species manifest across different contexts—from commercial fishing and aquaculture to conservation efforts – while highlighting these relationships’ complex, often contradictory nature. Drawing on anthropology of the ocean, political ecology, and multispecies studies, the collection investigates who cares for ocean creatures, how care is practiced, and the politics that shape these interactions. The authors acknowledge the tension between exploitation and protection, profit motives and environmental concerns, noting that care for particular species often occurs at the expense of others. By centring ocean creatures as ethnographic subjects, the collection contributes to growing anthropological interest in environmental justice and multispecies relations while advocating for more holistic approaches to marine environments in the Anthropocene.

This methods article explores how multimodal anthropology can enrich ethnographic engagements with contemporary environmental issues by extending research practices beyond conventional fieldwork settings. Focusing on a group of trash scuba divers in Sweden, the article examines their creation of a submerged installation – an imagined version of the lost city of Atlantis – constructed entirely from recovered marine debris. Situated off a beach outside Stockholm this underwater dive park offers both an immersive sensory experience and a material commentary on water and participating in the embodied, multisensory experience and a material commentary on marine pollution, urban futures, and ecological imagination. By following the divers into the water and participating in the embodied, multisensory practice of underwater ethnography, the research highlights how knowledge is generated not only through observation and conversation, but through movement, immersion, and affect. The article reflects on the methodological implications of engaging with environments that are fluid, unstable, and mediated by technologies such as scuba gear and cameras. In doing so, it argues that multimodal anthropology offers tools for more ethically attuned and ecologically responsive research practices – ones capable of capturing the complex entanglements between humans, waste, and watery worlds.

The Anthropology Book Forum (https://anthrobookforum.americananthro.org) was founded by the American Anthropological Association as an experimental digital platform aimed at accelerating the scholarly book review process and expanding conversations around newly published work. Based on the idea that book reviews are not just summaries of academic texts, but engagements with scholarship, ideas and authors, the Forum seeks to facilitate connections and exchange between authors and readers within and outside of anthropology. In 2022, the Forum was awarded the GAD New Directions Award (group category) for its sustained efforts towards transitioning to new modes of book reviews as well as to more diverse and accessible formats. In recent years, the Forum has sought to encourage and host new configurations of the book review, including visual, audio, and video formats that can reach a broader public both within and outside of academia. This roundtable seeks to host a conversation around the book review in transition, its role in contemporary scholarly exchange, and how it is evolving in the current era. Toward this end, this roundtable brings together authors who engage with reviews of their recently published work to reflect on the value of the book review, the role reviews play in reaching larger audiences, and what an author can learn about their work by engaging with reviews. It similarly highlights the ways in which different modes of review can provide a medium for early career scholars and graduate students to engage with disciplinary conversations, while also thinking about the value of reviews for larger audiences beyond anthropology.

In this dissertation, I investigate relations between humans, waste, pollution, and marine life. I introduce the concept of Aquabiopolitics as a means to understand how humans govern life in water in order to enrich human life on land. The study focuses on the Baltic Sea and Lake Mälaren, using Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, as the connection point. Throughout the dissertation, I explore how human practices over time have had devastating effects on marine life and continue to have so today. 

The dissertation engages with the marine world through underwater ethnography to provide a perspective on water from below the surface. In this endeavor, I employ the assistance of marine scientists and trash scuba divers who are jointly invested in tracking human maltreatment of water and finding solutions for treating water differently in the future. We will follow the scientists on expeditions at sea and to their laboratories in order to learn about their methods and relations to underwater worlds. Together with the trash scuba divers, we will dive into the dark murky waters around Stockholm—experiencing what it is like to move below water, among sharp and toxic waste, without any visibility.  

The work of creating a knowing and caring relationship between humans and water is of key importance to both scientists and divers. Therefore, one of the main parts of this dissertation is to analyze how, and if, this relationship can be created: via social media, images, installations, or other means. For as the divers often say: Water is Life. Make it Important!