InsurgenSeas

Oceans of Palestine VI: Countermapping the sea & the Global Sumud Flotilla

In this episode of InsurgenSeas, we sit down with Daniel Powers, Lizzie Malcolm, and Stefanos Levidis to explore how the sea is being remapped from below. Our conversation moves through the Flotilla Tracker as a tool of maritime activism: who builds and uses it, who it serves, and how it circulates within networks of solidarity. We trace the origins and ambitions of Forensic Architecture, unpacking its methods and political commitments to evidentiary practice against state violence. Together, we reflect on the power of mapping to make movements at sea visible, while questioning how visibility itself is shaped by the state’s surveillance gaze and migrant “mobility tracking.” Turning to the tragic Pylos shipwreck, Stefanos shares insights into documentation efforts and the challenges of contesting state narratives and legal obfuscation surrounding responsibility for mass death at sea. The discussion broadens to “mapping from below”, who these counter-mapping practices serve, who their allies are, and how they reconfigure the terrain of struggle across maritime borders. Finally, we pause to reflect critically on mapping as an aesthetic practice: does it risk beautifying suffering and movement, or can it hold space for political urgency without flattening lived realities? A conversation at once academic and human, this episode invites us to rethink the sea as a contested archive where evidence flow alongside currents of control. Link of episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIprW8-d10U [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIprW8-d10U]

Oceans of Palestine V: The Global South with tricontinental director Vijay Prashad

Notes:

Oceans of Palestine IV: Aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla

In this episode, Kostas Fourikos, a filmmaker and activist, speaks to us aboard the Greek ship of the Sumud Flotilla, sailing south of Crete on its way to Gaza. His life’s work moves between cinema, cultural organizing, and political struggle and on this ship, all of these threads meet. We discuss the flotilla as a refusal of siege, borders, occupation, and genocide. From a country whose government conforms with the global order of domination and war, even when its people have showed histories of solidarity, Kostas reflects on what it means to resist within and against these structures.

Oceans of Palestine III: Maritime Labor Solidarity, with Prof. David Featherstone

Dr. David Featherstone is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Glasgow whose recent work has illuminated the radical geographies of solidarity, resistance, and internationalism. Building on Doreen Massey’s legacies, he has published widely on political ecologies, labor histories, and transnational movements, including co-editing Doreen Massey: Selected Political Writings (2022) and Revolutionary Lives of the Red and Black Atlantic (2022). His research connects the struggles of dockworkers, anti-colonial activists, and contemporary movements for climate justice, foregrounding how place becomes a site of possibility through collective action. At Glasgow, he teaches and supervises across political ecology and spatial politics, while his recent lectures speak to his commitment to making geography a practice of critical solidarity. In this conversation, we touch upon the following points: - The importance of maritime spaces and labour in relation to shaping forms of internationalism from below. - The Interplay between past and present forms of maritime solidarities. - Contested and ambiguous aspects of maritime spaces and labour especially in regards to racialisation and automation. - Solidarity as a space of learning & exchange and challenging more top-down/one way flows of strategy and knowledge.

Oceans of Palestine II - Yemen Solidarity with Prof. Isa Blumi

In this episode, Dr. Nikolas Kosmatopoulos is joined by historian Dr. Isa Blumi and student Dina Al Amood for a powerful conversation on the Yemeni embargo in the Red Sea as an act of maritime solidarity in support of Gaza and Palestine. Dr. Blumi explores the dynamics of the Yemeni embargo on the Red Sea, positioning it within a longer history of indigenous resistance and maritime autonomy. The conversation unpacks how the current blockade reflects the tactical response to the ongoing Gaza war, Blumi also discusses how Yemenis have long resisted external interventions through their continued relation to the sea. Drawing on his extensive research, Blumi connects the embargo to broader transformations in the global political economy, while also emphasizing the significance of reading Yemen from the coast, rather than the capital. The episode invites listeners to consider how indigenous relationships to the sea open new ways of understanding sovereignty, survival, and solidarity in the age of maritime warfare.