January 17-21, 2024

The seascapes and landscapes of Southeast Asia provide a window into the deep historical connections between the environment and peoples who call Southeast Asia home. These engagements have shaped communities’ relationship with the landscape and provide a backdrop to the intersections among various forms of social, political, historical, and environmental processes. Coastal and island communities, in particular, continue to offer a suite of potential responses to environmental perturbations. This workshop will bring together a multidisciplinary group of scholars and community members to critically examine emerging issues on environmental dynamics in the context of local coastal ecologies. Focused on the intensified anthropogenic and climate change impact on landscapes, seascapes, and cultures, we will address pressing issues of local coastal ecologies by providing a platform where scholars, academics, policymakers, and communities can engage.

This workshop seeks to integrate methodological and theoretical approaches that bridge archaeology, paleoclimatology, environmental history, environmental sciences, geography, indigenous studies, and the humanities. This generates a multidisciplinary understanding of island and coastal ecologies during the early modern period of Southeast Asia up to the present. The early modern period is historically understudied in this large region, yet it was a time period of intense cultural change due to changing climate, colonization, and industrialization that had long-term and widespread effects on peoples and their ecologies. Panelists will discuss human relationships with the landscape, economics, history, and heritage, and how current research
initiatives address these complexities.

This workshop emphasizes multidisciplinary perspectives in order to provide a broader and more holistic approach to addressing the underrepresentation of local communities and marginalized groups in compelling long-term anthropogenic and climate impacts on human-environment conversations.

Cosponsors: