Dean of the Global School, Mimi Sheller will participate in the opening plenary panel the American Ethnological Society (AES) spring conference, to be held at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from March 20–22, 2025. AES invites scholars to consider whether archipelagos and “archipelagic thinking” can aid us to analyze pressing global challenges across cultures, geographies, climates, disciplines, and methodologies.
Archipelagos are island chains formed in a body of water from coral reefs, seafloor volcanoes, sedimentary or tectonic action, sea level rise, or human agency. Such “chains” may compose sovereign island states large and small (i.e. Indonesia; Cape Verde, Bahamas, and Maldives, etc.), territories of “mainland” nation-states (i.e. Puerto Rico, Scotland’s Shetland Islands, etc.), and components of governmental units within the nation-state, such as Boston’s Harbor Islands in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There are also continental archipelagos like British Columbia’s Inside Passage and fabricated archipelagic island cities like Venice or Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah and World Islands.
Her session is entitled "Édouard Glissant, Archipelagic Thinking, and Contemporary Politics".
