FEARING, TRACKING, AND LOVING SHARKS: OCEAN CONSERVATION AND THE MATERIAL RHETORIC OF HUMAN-SHARK ENTANGLEMENTS

This dissertation focuses on the following questions: 1) How do multispecies engagements rhetorically reconfigure the human, the shark and, to some degree, the ocean? and 2) How do such multispecies engagements refigure value relevant to conservation? These questions are explored within a framework of shark conservation as a field of biopolitics exploring the tensions inherent in the project of transforming sharks from killable enemies to valuable, living selves and the constraints and potentials that come into view when new relational possibilities emerge. Conservation practices, especially biodiversity conservation practices, are not merely management choices; they are political choices that shape future worlds. Further, this dissertation is an inquiry into the relationship between rhetoric, materiality, and conservation aimed toward a relational ontology of the ocean, in which human beings and many others co-constitute the ocean. By examining what three selected assemblages tell us about ocean epistemologies and the biopolitics of ocean conservation, I show that conservation as a project continues to emerge from intra-actions that are not predetermined—even by such hegemonic global meta-assemblages as capitalism or biodiversity conservation—but characterized by entangled relations between sharks and human beings that enable or constrain sustainable relations with the ocean. The assemblages considered are constituted by human-shark encounters through the practices of tagging and real-time tracking of sharks; diving to engage sharks; and culling sharks, that is, killing sharks to eliminate threats to human beings. These embodied practices variously assemble scientists, divers, participants in local and national fishing industries, activists, sharks, environmental governmental and non-governmental agencies, the media, audiences, and communication and underwater technologies. I map how assemblages coalesce around the practices, how their arrangements shed light on ocean matters of concern, the ontological disturbances that may give rise to potential transformations. These assemblages are performative in that they embody rhetorical struggles over biodiversity conservation, human-animal relations, and ethics