Professor Lindsay Bremner, Principal Investigator of Monsoon Assemblages, has been awarded a one-year planning grant for her project ‘Sounding the Monsoon’.
The grant has been awarded by the US Social Science Research Councils’ Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean. 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.
The project is led by Jonathan Cane at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and includes participants Euclides Goncalves (Co-Pi) and Rufus Maculuva of Kaleidoscopio in Mozambique, and Samid Suliman and Kaya Barry of Griffith University in Australia.
The project is underpinned by the idea as put by science and technology scholar, Sheila Jasonoff: “living creatively with climate change will require re-linking larger scales of scientific representation with smaller scales of social meaning.”
The grant will enable the project team to test strategies to explore changing human-ecological-monsoonal relations in the Indian Ocean Region by bringing together sound recordings and dance performances of the monsoon in Mozambique and maps of the monsoon using climate data, as a way of engaging creatively with science, everyday experience and policy makers in the region.
The grant will also facilitate the international engagement and travel, where possible, with the goal of building a team to develop further grant proposals.
The program is part of the Transnational Initiative, a thematic portfolio of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), which is an independent, international, non-profit organization that fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilises necessary knowledge on important public issues.
Professor Bremner said about the grant: “I am very excited about the award of this small grant. It will carry forward the research methodologies developed by Monsoon Assemblages, my current ERC grant, and enable the project team to begin a working relationship, with the intention of developing further grant funding applications.”
Learn more about the Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean on the SSRC website.
