The sea, and in particular the Antarctica and the Southern Ocean (A&SO), were the common thread running through my studies in the Geosciences (where I studied marine biogeochemistry) and Social Sciences (where I specialised in the sociology of law and of environmental public action) departments at ENS-PSL. Since 2022, I have been working as a scientific officer for the French government, for the ministries dealing with environmental public policy, and I am lucky enough to be now working on the academic research side by doing a PhD, during which I am hosted at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, France (ENS-PSL, EHESS, CNRS) and at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies – Centre for Marine Socioecology in Hobart, Australia (University of Tasmania), a global hub for ocean, polar and sustainability research, as well as the hostcity of the international organisation that governs the Southern Ocean, the CCAMLR.

My research focuses on the ways in which knowledge and representations of the (Southern) Ocean are taken up and translated between academic, political and technical spheres, which for several decades have been engaged in a process of social construction of the Southern Ocean (which has repeatedly served as a model for other oceanic and environmental governance systems). In particular, I am focusing on the mechanistic and functional visions of the ocean for its own sake, analysed under the magnifying glass of ocean biogeochemistry (nutrient reservoirs, carbon pump, biomass production).

The ODIPE project allows me to put my A&SO questions back into a more global framework of ‘one-ocean’ diplomacy, which is staged to facilitate a flux of information from communities of oceanic knowledge, towards communities of oceanic issues and interests, and public authorities. But these exchanges are far from being simply linear. I will therefore look at the place and scope of functional and timed images of the ocean within the debates and events held during this sequence of ocean diplomacy.