Aquapelagos: Integrated Terrestrial and Marine Assemblages

Aquapelagos is a cross-disciplinary volume that is geared to a general undergraduate and non-specialist readership while also being rigorous and theoretically exciting for doctoral and advanced researchers of climate and ocean studies. It foregrounds marine-terrestrial assemblages as philosophical, navigational, and knowledge-making interfaces.

Drawing on ethnographic, geographic, architectural, sociological, and scientific methodogies, Aquapelagos sheds light on varied approaches, dialogues, and responses to the catastrophic and impending futures unfolding across waterfronts from the Andaman Islands, Maldives, and Indonesia to the Grand Banks and the Juan Fernandez Islands. It delves into pressing issues of human interrelations with aquatic environments, ocean volatility, ocean toxicity, flooding, inundation, mitigation, rising seas, and climate adaptation in interdisciplinary and comparative global terms. Within the conceptual framework of the aquapelago the contributors to this volume explore notions such as the archipelago, lagoon thinking, coastal waterfronts, and the littoral imagination as concepts that can open up new ways of understanding the ecologies emerging out of the increasingly wet, accelerated precipitation, and global sinking of coastlands and islands across the world.

The volume will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students of ethnography, social anthropology, climate action, development studies, public policy, and climate change.

Philip Hayward is an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, Canada, editor of the journal Shima and a strategic advisor for the River Cities Network. His research addresses oceanic, island, coastal and riverine environments with particular regard to issues of cultural heritage, tourism and representation. He has published articles in journals such as Anthropocenes, Island Studies Journal, Lagoonscapes, Small States and Territories and Transformations and has written and edited 14 books.

May Joseph is Professor of Social Science at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, USA and author of Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (2022); ghosts of Lumumba (2020), Sealog: Indian Ocean to New York (2019); Fluid New York: Cosmopolitan Urbanism and the Green Imagination (2013); and Nomadic Identities: The Performance of Citizenship (1999). Joseph is co-editor (with Sudipta Sen) of Terra Aqua: The Amphibious Lifeworlds of Coastal and Maritime South Asia (2022); and co-Editor of Performing Hybridity (1999). She co-edits three book series from Routledge, Critical Climate Studies, Ocean and Island Studies, and Kaleidoscope: Ethnography, Art, Architecture and Archaeology.