Next Wednesday September 10th, by 9.00 pm at Cinema Passos Manuel, Porto, Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg will present the lecture “Ten Myths of Critical Ocean Studies”.

For decades now, critical environmental scholars (including geographers, historians, anthropologists, and those working in fields of literature, science and technology studies, architecture and beyond) have been turning to the ocean (and other non-solid, non-landed, spaces) to develop alternative modes of understanding that are not “fixed” but rather build from the ocean’s spatial and temporal fluidity. And yet, strangely, some of the ways of knowing in what is part of this “oceanic turn” often reproduce the very epistemologies and ontologies that the turn to the ocean had sought to undermine. In this keynote address ten myths that are prevalent in much of the ocean studies literature are identified and unpacked in order to think critically about what our assumptions of ocean do and mean, and where they may limit work, including that of architecture historians. Like most myths, the myths explored are not objectively “wrong;” in many instances, in fact, they provocatively suggest truths that are less clear when viewing things “from the land.” However, in their simplified explanations, and in the narratives that emerge around those explanations, these myths typically foreclose other ways of thinking that might go further in realising the ocean’s potential as a means for understanding planetary relations, and destabilising Western norms of viewing the world.

Kimberley Peters leads a research group of interdisciplinary scholars, exploring Marine Governance at the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, part of the Alfred Wegener Institute and University of Oldenburg. As a human geographer, her research focuses on space in the context of the sea, with particular interest on how power operates in the marine environment and how governance works (and fails). She is the author of books, including Rebel Radio: Sound, Space and Society (Springer Nature, 2018) and co-editor of Living with the Seas: Knowledge, Awareness, Action (Routledge, 2019) and The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space (2022) and most recent the open access text Ocean Governance (Beyond) Borders (Palgrave, 2025).

Philip Steinberg leads the UArctic Chair in Political Geography at Durham University. He taught at Florida State University between 1997 and 2013, with interludes in California, New York and London. His research focuses on the historical, ongoing, and, at times, imaginary projection of social power onto spaces whose geophysical and geographic characteristics make them resistant to state territorialisation. He is the author of many books, including The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space (2022).