URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Fall_2021_Melissa-McCarthy

REORIENTING MARINE AFFAIRS TOWARDS JUSTICE With a doctorate in sociocultural anthropology, Associate Professor Amelia Moore, URI Department of Marine Affairs, has been crisscrossing the globe studying marine affairs through the lens of anthropology and social justice advocacy. “My current research focuses on coastal places, especially islands, and how they have been imagined and used in colonial experimental ways for the advancement of settler control, ownership, and exploitation,” she says. “My hope is that by conducting research, teaching and changing the curriculum, we can raise awareness of the history of colonialism, enslavement, and migration, as well as recognize that our coasts and seas have been subject to many generations of structural and institutional injustice.” Moore says marine affairs can become a tool for all forms of justice: environmental, climate, and racial, in order to dismantle some of the colonial infrastructures that shape the way we live on and manage our coasts, resources and marine spaces. From The Bahamas to Indonesia to the state of Rhode Island, she found that the structures of governance, the decision makers, and even the scientific community were deeply colonized, making it nearly impossible to imagine alternatives that might address historical and contemporary injustices. Currently, she is co-producing The Decolonizing Science Documentary Film (working title), directed by Professor Kendall Moore in URI’s Harrington School of Communication and Media. Slated for release in early 2023, the documentary explains the

MARY GRACE A. ALMANDREZ Associate Vice President for Community, Equity and Diversity Chief Diversity Officer

historical context for supremacy in higher education and the natural sciences and explores the need to create a more inclusive and equitable STEM culture. Still actively filming, the duo hopes to pack as much narrative as possible into 90 minutes. The film follows scientists and policymakers as they face the changing social justice landscape and seascape in the U.S. For example, there’s an effort underway to memorialize the Middle Passage in the Atlantic Ocean, the route slave ships took from Africa to the Americas,

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