Marcella SCHMIDT DI FRIEDBERG, Univ of MIlano-Bicocca, Italy
Mizna MOHAMED, Univ of MIlano-Bicocca, Italy
Stefano MALATESTA, Univ of MIlano-Bicocca, Italy
During the past decades, the Maldives has been facing radical change and hard challenges due to a range of different factors: environmental crises, over-dominant foreign investments in the tourism sector, new consumption models, the worsening of social and economic imbalances. In the meanwhile, the Country has become a symbol of exposure to climate change, materialising the ‘brandization’ of islands vulnerability and smallness deeply discussed by international scholars (Moore 2010, Baldacchino 2012, Gay 2014, Kelman 2014). As a result, interest in the geography and environment of the archipelago has steadily increased in the scientific debate. Within this scenario, in 2021 we edited a volume: Atolls of the Maldives (Rowman & Littlefied, Rethinking the Island Series). The book is the outcome of a five-year scientific journey, and meetings among international scholars and national experts, activists and policymakers: a “triangular cooperation between the scientific disciplines, local and indigenous knowledge, and policy” (call for abstract). The dialectic between the voices of insiders and the gaze of outsiders is a key theme in Island Studies (Grydehøj 2018). Combining biographies, field notes and research design, our contribution to Tgir IGU session, moves beyond this binomial (outsider-insider) and tells the story of the encounters, co-designs, negotiations among different languages and instances (scientific, political, cultural), and cross-fertilization that shaped the book project and elicited “a transdisciplinary research landscape” established “for and by local [and international] students and scholar” (see: call for abstract).
Mots clés : Maldives|Insider&outsider|cooperation|biography|trans-discipline
A103132SM