Brackish knowledge: materiality, numerical modelling, and the politics of knowing coastal futures

Abstract

This thesis attends to the craft and science of making models of the coastal ocean. I follow ocean researchers who study the Dutch coast to understand how they make models, what they learn from those models, and which resources are necessary for their development and use in science. With models, scientists grasp times and geographies that might otherwise be beyond their reach, for example allowing them to peer months, years, or decades into the future to predict ocean circulations like those spanning the Atlantic. The material processes and properties of coastal environments, however, are complex and only partially understood, complicating the equations which scientists use to model and describe coastal changes.While scientists are intimately aware of the strengths and limitations of their computational practices, these are nevertheless part of and subject to wider systems of environmental and research governance. In other words, the decisions about what to include in a model are driven by practical constraints—not only about what data and computing time are available, but also what funding and human labour researchers have access to. The factors which come to constitute what and how we know about coastal futures, I argue, are constituted by the confluence of three elements: firstly, the materiality of coastal environments; secondly, the intricacies of numerical modelling practices; and thirdly, the institutional conditions of contemporary environmental and research governance. The confluences of research and environmental governance ultimately shape which lives are more valuable than others, which economies prosper, and whose worlds are worth protecting.