Description

The University of California, Santa Cruz proposes a new Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions initiative (SEACOAST).  Drawing on UCSC’s strengths in coastal studies and interdisciplinary field building, SEACOAST will host research drawing together scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to explore the histories and ongoing transformations of SEAsian coastal land and seascapes.  The project is designed to develop UCSC as an innovative leader in SEAsian studies, and to offer new directions and field building opportunities by sponsoring collaborative research.
                   “Coastal interactions,” write project co-directors Anna Tsing (Anthropology, Indonesia) and Megan Thomas (Politics, Philippines), refers not only to places and activities on the shoreline, but also to the range of interchanges, human and nonhuman, connecting land and sea.  Such interactions, they continue, both foment and suffer from social and environmental crisis.  UCSC’s proposed study of coastal interactions in SEA, location of some of the world’s richest gathering places of cultural and biological diversity, offers an opportunity to show how local and regional histories matter in global environmental change.
                   Individual and collaborative research projects supported by the grant, conducted in partnership with SEA institutions, will put humanists and social scientists in dialogue with ecologists and biologists to examine coastal interactions that link, and have an impact upon, land and sea, leading to unintended social, economic and biological outcomes.  Topics of study include the live coral trade in Sulawesi, the sea cucumber trade in Sulu, salt production in Timor, land subsidence in Jakarta, and harmful algal blooms in the Straits of Johor between Malaysia and Singapore.
                   To create scholarly infrastructure at UCSC, the university will use the grant to seed a permanent line for an environmental historian with expertise in SEA.  Grant funds will also support graduate students, postdoctoral fellow positions and dissertation fellowships.  To build community, a new SEACOAST Center will host an active program of seminars, visiting scholars, lab meetings and field trips to foster synergies between and across disciplines and research agendas.  Project outcomes will include new courses and revised curricula to expand teaching on SEA at UCSC.
                   UCSC has confirmed commitment to the permanency of the new faculty position and to significant cost share, including for a graduate student research assistant over the life of the grant, start-up funds and course release for the new position, assumption of responsibility for the salary and benefits of the new hire beginning in the grant’s final year, and waiver of indirect costs.