Coastal Frontiers Launched
May 30th 2012
Today marks the formal launch of the Coastal Frontiers website. We are delighted to welcome you all to our new home!
About Coastal Frontiers
Water—the rains, rivers, and seas—is crucial to Asia’s future, and to understanding its past. The coastal regions at the heart of what was once known as ‘monsoon Asia’ have more recently been called the ‘ground zero of climate change’. They are environmentally vulnerable, densely populated, and at the fault-line of struggles between India and China for regional dominance. Coastal Frontiers will situate the current crisis in a much deeper history of environmental transformation, imperial competition, and cultural change.
Based on archival and ethnographic research, Coastal Frontiers will study the environmental history of the Bay of Bengal’s coastal rim from the late-nineteenth century to the present day. The research will investigate the relationship between political and environmental change in this expansive, but deeply connected, region. It will focus on key coastal sites at the frontiers of ecological change, at the frontiers between empires and nations, between rivers and seas, between terrestrial and maritime law.
Coastal Frontiers will address four key areas:
- Borders, sovereignty, and geopolitics
- Experiences and memories of environmental change
- Changing livelihoods of coastal communities
- The importance of locality: 3-4 case studies from around the Bay of Bengal rim
