Tamara Fernando is a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge researching the marine environmental history of the Indian Ocean with a focus on natural pearl fisheries in the nineteenth century. Her writing has appeared in Himal Southasian, Lady Science, and Environmental History Now.
Tamara Fernando
Articles by Tamara Fernando:
Ecology’s Ghosts
in Issue 97 | Prophecies II (Apr 2021)In 2016, among lonely sea urchins the color of day-old blood and a smattering of feather-soft hydrozoa wafting in the current, a team of scientific divers set out to catalog the physical features and species composition of known pearl-oyster reefs in the waters around Qatar.
Death at the Pearl Fishery
in Issue 95 | Symptoms (Jul 2020)At the British-run pearl fisheries of India and Ceylon, policing divers’ bodies was key to ensuring that a recalcitrant and dangerously mobile labor force was anchored in place. But the body acquired a new salience—as both a threat and a potential site of resistance—in the form of illness and epidemic disease.