- https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2025.2597224
Let Atlantis Sink: Underwater Ethnography, Waste Sculptures, and Multimodal Environmental Communication
This article demonstrates how multimodal anthropology enhances ethnographic research on environmental issues by engaging with underwater practices, exemplified by Swedish trash scuba divers creating a submerged Atlantis from marine debris. The approach emphasizes embodied, multisensory immersion, revealing insights into marine pollution, ecological imagination, and human-waste-water entanglements, while highlighting methodological considerations for fluid, mediated environments.
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This methods article explores how multimodal anthropology can enrich ethnographic engagements with contemporary environmental issues by extending research practices beyond conventional fieldwork settings. Focusing on a group of trash scuba divers in Sweden, the article examines their creation of a submerged installation – an imagined version of the lost city of Atlantis – constructed entirely from recovered marine debris. Situated off a beach outside Stockholm this underwater dive park offers both an immersive sensory experience and a material commentary on water and participating in the embodied, multisensory experience and a material commentary on marine pollution, urban futures, and ecological imagination. By following the divers into the water and participating in the embodied, multisensory practice of underwater ethnography, the research highlights how knowledge is generated not only through observation and conversation, but through movement, immersion, and affect. The article reflects on the methodological implications of engaging with environments that are fluid, unstable, and mediated by technologies such as scuba gear and cameras. In doing so, it argues that multimodal anthropology offers tools for more ethically attuned and ecologically responsive research practices – ones capable of capturing the complex entanglements between humans, waste, and watery worlds.
