Academic Collaboration under Penn Global, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA begins on 1 July 2022

Academic Collaboration under Penn Global on “The Kerala Maritime Communities Project (KMCP) University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, begins on 1 July 2022. The project is headed by Professor Thomas F. Tartaron at the Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania. The collaborators from IUCSSRE are Prof P. Sanal Mohan, visiting fellow, IUCSSRE and Prof Sujith Parayil, Adjunct faculty, IUCSSRE.

Kerala Maritime Communities Project

The Kerala Maritime Communities Project (KMCP) engages several “traditional” fishing communities in Kerala state, South India. The specific aims of KMCP are to:

• Preserve the vanishing cultural heritage of these communities in the form of a physical and virtual open-source archive of recorded oral histories, songs, videos, writings, and artifacts;
• Document changing ways of life as impacted by disruptions to the coastal environment, including human-induced climate change, damaging coastal constructions and engineering, and diminished marine resources;
• Explore Kerala fishing communities as a cross-cultural comparative case of coastal adaptations in world history and ethnoarchaeology; and
• Exchange Indian and American scholars and students for workshops and course development.

Tartaron will partner with Mahatma Gandhi University and the Kerala Council for Historical Research to disseminate results locally and worldwide through open-source platforms. The project follows upon a pilot phase in 2014 consisting of 17 oral history interviews.

Professor Thomas F. Tartaron

Prof P Sanal Mohan 

Prof Sujith Parayil