About

Transregional Collaboratory On The

INDIAN OCEAN

ABOUT

The Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean is born of environmental realities—the Indian Ocean is the fastest warming ocean in the world—and principles central to the SSRC mission.

Program Summary

The Transregional Collaboratory unites scholars across the region and the globe focusing on the implications of environmental issues such as saltwater intrusion, disruption of traditional trade patterns, and changing migration dynamics. While the Collaboratory focuses on a central location and theme, it disrupts traditional ways of understanding regional and environmental issues by bridging geographic, institutional, and academic boundaries. The program is purposefully designed to foster a new model of transnational research ethics that emphasizes South-South collaboration and supports institutions and researchers that have been overlooked by models of research funding and collaboration historically driven by institutions from the Global North.

This project emerged from several strands of topical inquiry within SSRC programs, as well as a burgeoning attentiveness to the role that funders and funding collaborators in the Global North can play in perpetuating inequalities in knowledge production in the Global South, even via projects that were nominally collaborative. The Collaboratory seeks to support novel modes of engagement through which locally situated researchers can access the resources needed to coproduce knowledge alongside international peers.

With generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this program will issue its first call for research proposals in early 2020. Funded research will form the basis for the organizing of collaborative working groups over the next several years. Participants will be part of an emerging cadre of scholars generating new insights on social, economic and political dynamics across the Indian Ocean in the context of climate
and environmental change.