ABSTRACT

This chapter charts the intellectual and methodological pathways that are intertwined with the multiple places that we as authors, our interlocutors, and our communities inhabit. First, we describe how, as editors and as women of color, we came to participate in and craft this volume. Second, the chapter offers a brief review of the field of Indian Ocean studies and the ways in which this volume breaks new ground with its focus on contemporary Indian Ocean worlds; it outlines keywords to approach these worlds – relationality, space/place and quotidian practices, new networks of memory and maps – and emphasizes ethnographic, fieldwork-based, humanistic, and experimental methods. Third, it describes the collaborative process of thinking, research, and practice that went into the creation of this volume between 2014 and 2019 at the University of California, Davis.