จักรกริช สังขมณี

I am a Thai anthropologist working at the intersection of ecological anthropology and science and technology studies (STS). Currently I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

My earlier research explored hydro-ontology through irrigation projects, engineers, and the making of the modern state in Thailand. My recent work follows environmental infrastructures through Bangkok’s heat, humidity, rains, and floods, exploring how amphibious deltaic ecologies and coastal urban atmospheres shape political life and practices of care.

These interests also take me beneath the sea. As an Advanced Open Water scuba diver and a certified Environment Monitoring Program (EMP) conservation diver, I bring diving into my anthropological fieldwork as both a research practice and a source of personal enjoyment. My Thai-language book, Thalasso-anthropology: An Ethnography of Technology, Multispecies, Materiality, and Speculative Story Under the Ocean (2024), explores underwater worlds through diving technologies, coral ecologies, shipwrecks, and speculative storytelling.

I am currently developing a new book, The Means of the Sea: Instruments, Media, and Oceanic Relations. Through encounters with marine scientists, underwater photographers, acoustic engineers, conservation divers, artists, and small-scale fishers, the project explores how people come to sense, know, and live with the sea. It follows cameras, hydrophones, coral nurseries, fishing gear, and embodied skills to ask how marine change becomes perceptible, whose knowledge gains authority, and what forms of care and livelihood become possible in a changing ocean.