Braverman, Irus --- "The life and law of corals: breathing meditations" [2017] ELECD 1460; in Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas; Brooks, Victoria (eds), "Research Methods in Environmental Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 458

Book Title: Research Methods in Environmental Law

Editor(s): Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas; Brooks, Victoria

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784712563

Section: Chapter 19

Section Title: The life and law of corals: breathing meditations

Author(s): Braverman, Irus

Number of pages: 24

Abstract/Description:

Corals have recently emerged as both a sign and a measure of the catastrophic future of life on earth at this particularly volatile time, referred to by some as the Anthropocene. As such, they have been the focus of intensive conservation management. Their symbiotic algae-bacterial-animal relationship and their precarious oceanic, ecological, and chimeric life make corals fascinating windows into biopolitical regimes of conservation. Corals are also ‘good to think with’ about the interface of culture, science, and law and about the particular ways through which law makes life. My chapter draws on a dozen in-depth interviews with scientists and policy makers, mostly in the United States but also in Australia and Israel, as well as on participatory observations of both coral and coral scientists, to explore how laws calculate and govern the project of saving (certain) coral life. I refer to this reflective, ‘breathing-with’ methodology, whereby the ethnographer submerses herself with the subjects or topic of her inquiry, as ‘immersive ethnography’. Utilizing this immersive ethnographic stance, my chapter recognizes the ‘becoming legalities’ of coral conservation, demonstrating that coral life and death are not only biological and cultural, but also legal, phenomena.