In this article I follow the mystery of millions of tons of materials washed out to sea by the March 2011 Japan tsunami: a massive wave of lost materials expected to reach North American shores that never seems to officially arrive. I bring Gordon’s conceptualization of haunting together with STS conversations about absence and invisibility to build on feminist approaches that do not take as given what is missing or what should be done. I begin by situating efforts to respectfully distinguish materials survivors call ‘floating things’ amidst a sea of concern for ocean plastic pollution. These efforts are then contrasted with what I initially perceived as the institutional erasure of floating things at sea, re-counting how some practices work to ensure materials can be ignored, cleaned-up, or used for other kinds of ocean science research. Yet, floating things refuse to disappear completely, as potential traces wash up on beaches, trajectories are modeled back into existence, and individual practices exceed institutional obligations. I argue that attending to hauntings by listening to ghosts and drifting with them is necessary for justice-oriented forms of care for absences. In the case of floating things, this means honoring survivor relations while resisting the perpetuation of Pacific narratives of danger from the outside.

中文翻译：

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“漂浮物”和方法论漂移：解释北太平洋闹鬼的物质


在本文中，我将探究 2011 年 3 月日本海啸导致数百万吨物质被冲入大海的谜团：预计将到达北美海岸的大量丢失物质似乎从未正式抵达。我将戈登关于困扰的概念与 STS 关于缺席和隐形的对话结合在一起，以女权主义方法为基础，这些方法不认为缺失了什么或应该做什么。首先，我在对海洋塑料污染的关注中，首先努力区分幸存者称之为“漂浮物”的材料。然后，这些努力与我最初认为的对海上漂浮物的制度性擦除进行了对比，重新计算了一些做法如何确保材料可以被忽略、清理或用于其他类型的海洋科学研究。然而，漂浮物并不会完全消失，因为潜在的痕迹被冲到海滩上，轨迹被建模重新存在，个人实践超出了机构义务。我认为，通过倾听鬼魂并与鬼魂一起漂流来处理闹鬼事件，对于以正义为导向的缺勤护理形式是必要的。就漂浮物而言，这意味着尊重幸存者关系，同时抵制来自外部的太平洋危险叙事的延续。