Global Encounters Monash (GEM)
The Global Encounters Monash project explores relationships between First Nations peoples and those who come from across the seas. While our prime focus is on Australian First Nations and their history of encountering and interacting with people, technologies, plants, animals, and ideas from across the seas, we are interested in comparative stories of oceanic encounters and interactions. The Global Encounters team are looking beyond Australia’s coasts as we explore the nature of encounters around the world, from the perspectives of both insiders looking out and outsiders looking in. We are imaginatively examining encounters onboard the visiting ships, as well as those that took place on the traditional lands of Indigenous peoples. This project takes an expansive view of archives and sources as we explore texts, oral histories and stories, rock art and material culture, plant and vegetation histories, introduced animals, and language and linguistic evidence.
Spheres of Interaction: A Handbook of Global Oceanic Encounters
Spheres of Interaction will be a major edited collection of interdisciplinary Encounter histories, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2024, and edited by the Global Encounters Monash team. We seek contributions from scholars and cultural practitioners across the disciplines of history, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, art theory, performance, botany, zoology and science. The common, uniting theme of this volume will be encounters of human and non-human actors on the beaches, bays, and estuaries where cultures and often species meet.
We invite expressions of interest which focus on oceans (the Pacific, Indian or Atlantic) or the littoral (coasts, bays and estuaries). We are interested in maritime interaction spheres in Southeast Asia, African nations, the Middle East, and the Americas, during the last millennium.
Some topics might include (but are not limited to):
- First Nations accounts of seafaring
- Interactions across oceans
- Indigenous intermediaries
- Trade and exchange
- Shipwrecks and material culture
- Gender and the sea
- Literary and fictionalised accounts of ocean voyaging
- Maritime interaction spheres (eg Swahili Coast, ‘Maritime Silk Road’, Manila Galleon network)
- Interspecies encounters (eg animal, vegetable or mineral; fungal, viral)
- Remembering and commemorating encounters
Submission of Abstracts
We invite detailed proposals for chapters of 5,000 to 8,000 words in length, which address the themes of Oceanic Encounters and Spheres of Interaction. Deadline for submission of the abstracts is September 30th 2022, with the selected essays due on June 30th 2023.
Abstracts should:
- be approximately 1,000 words in length
- give a sense of the types of sources or evidence to be used
- be submitted in Microsoft Word format to Global.Encounters@Monash.
edu
References in the text
The whole citation should follow the Harvard style, enclosed within parentheses (author surname, year) if not a natural part of the surrounding sentence; the year should be enclosed within parentheses if the names do form a natural part of the surrounding sentence. Citations of works by two authors should have ‘and’ (not an ampersand) between the names. Citations of works by three or more authors should have the first author followed by et al in italics with no trailing stop. Publications by the same author(s) in the same year should be identified with a, b, c (e.g. 2008a, 2008b) closed up to the year. Personal communications should be listed as such where they are cited in the text, and not listed in the references.
All chapters will include up to 3 images (including maps).
Please also include a brief biography (100-150 words).
Feel free to reach out to the team if you’d like to float any ideas, and for more information, please contact Global.Encounters@
