News Archive

"The SAND research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology is excited to launch a public literary database on sand. The database mainly consists of social scientific publications on the topic of sand, but also includes entries from other disciplines, ranging from economic studies of sand mafias to hard scientific investigations of coastal protection measures and climate change adaptation. The references are organised by world region which enables users to quickly find literature pertaining to a specific area or water body. Further, the database comprises studies on related topics, such as the global construction industry, geology, or land grabbing. In addition, non-academic publications related to sand were included to capture how literary and artistic work approaches the topic of sand. In total, the database currently contains over 300 references. It is supposed to constantly grow to reflect increasing interest in the material and emerging ways of writing about it."

S.AND: The Future of Coastal Cities in the Indian Ocean World

The S.AND team just published a report on its ongoing research activities in coastal cities of the Afrasian Sea. The short article outlines the research project, touches on its key objectives, and introduces two case studies that our research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle is presently working on. You can read the full piece here: https://ari.nus.edu.sg/ariscope/sand-the-future-of-coastal-cities-in-the-indian-ocean-world/.
Website launch

Website launch

Follow our investigation of coastal sand online! The S.AND team just launched its own website: www.s-and.org. The website allows members of the research team to present preliminary findings of their ethnographic research in the form of redacted fieldnotes, image material, and the occasional sand joke. We also aim to extend our network by featuring the work of other sand researchers, artists, and curators. The design concept of Bureau Neue, a Leipzig-based visual communication firm run by Roger Lehner, is supposed to invite browsing and scrolling through various layers of sand. You can also follow us on Mastodon and X (@Sandworldsgroup).
Podcast-Interview
In this interview with Alize Arican (Rutgers University's Center for Cultural Analysis), Lukas Ley speaks about his book "Building on Borrowed Time: Rising Seas and Failing Infrastructure in Semarang" (UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS 2021). He discusses core concepts of the book as well as his methodological approach to studying urban floods in Indonesia. more
The Coastal Edge
Concrete plays a central role in coastal futures. As cities and other actors prepare for rising sea levels, new infrastructures and coastal fortifications have become common modes of protecting and weathering incoming storms. This short article describes concrete in its most innovative form, Géocorail, a natural compound that produces a concrete-like structure out of the pre-existing elements in seawater.
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minutes of the workshop

Coastal Futures Workshop, June 2021

The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology hosted the Coastal Futures Workshop in June 2021, which opened with a public keynote by Jason Cons and an artist intervention by Tomoko Sauvage. The (closed) workshop brought together anthropologists and geographers working on coastal matters to discuss their contributions to an edited volume tentatively entitled "Coastal Futures".
 
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