The project MARGINS - People, rice and mangroves at the margins: A hybrid and contested interface in a changing world, has focused on the memory, international relations, anthropology and ecology of places built on the interface between rice paddies and mangroves in Guinea-Bissau. These spaces have been shaken by overlapping social, economic and political factors that make it difficult to reproduce rice as a way of life, conditions that the effects of global warming have exacerbated. With MARGINS, we have been looking at these transformations to contribute to the rice world's decision-making processes. The project's strong training component means that master's students set the pace for the processes we are experiencing. The intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogues to which we are committed throw us into challenges of interpretation, translation and the search for ways of hearing and being heard. Being rooted in climate disruption and uncertainty provokes a confrontation with the idea of crisis as an analytical category in order to look at the specificities of this crisis, those that preceded it, and life in spite of them. During the seminar, we want to interpret, translate and cross-reference experiences, observe the old limits, understand the new crises and, from specific places, look where we deem necessary.

With much of the empirical collection completed, it is time to hear about and discuss preliminary impressions, results and analyses. What awaits us are the hypotheses, the uncertainties and the enthusiasm to establish this dialogue, which will take place between Coimbra and Bissau, in several languages and many voices. So, inviting any colleagues who would like to join us, we would like to be able to continue looking for ways to reinvent ourselves in the face of the different disciplines, languages, perspectives and experiences that have guided our different paths of training and experience, so that we can challenge the limits that make us up and establish thinking from useful bases to think critically and with the necessary discernment about the challenges of the present.

During this two-day seminar, we will also try to think about how to express transdisciplinarity, in particular by recognising the sharing of knowledge by farmers, the experience of those who have worked in ministries, NGOs and colleagues and who have collaborated with MARGINS. Finally, it is also our aspiration to contribute to situated action concerning climate change in its local and global places, which has led and will continue to lead to the forced reconfiguration of coastal areas such as those where the basis of Guinean livelihoods - rice - is produced.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Event in hybrid format, with the possibility of remote participation in all sessions except the session CRISIS AND TRANSDISCIPLINARITY IN IMAGE II | VIDEO.

Registration is free but compulsory | Deadline for registration: 26 October 2023

* The MARGINS project (FCT; PTDC/SOC-ANT/0741/202) is based on a collaboration between the Centre for Social Studies (CES-UC), the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Climate Change (cE3c) in Lisbon, the Amílcar Cabral University (UAC) and the National Institute for Studies and Research (INEP), both in Bissau.