FKK, the Danish Free Research Council

August 2021 - September 2025

Focusing on community-led infrastructure projects, CO-OC will investigate how transregional relations play out in the everyday lives and social imaginaries of one of the Gujarati Muslim communities residing in the port cities of Mumbai, Dar es Salaam and Dubai. Furnished by monsoon winds, connections of all kinds – economic, religious, material, aesthetics, social, political – have crisscrossed the Indian Ocean for millennia. Today the region has re-emerged as an increasingly important focus of geopolitical strategy. By way of an ethnographically rich analysis of community-led Muslim infrastructural initiatives, CO-OC aims to advance the study of what has been called ‘thick transregionalism’. Studying the social life of infrastructures of a heterogenous religious community in three littoral locations, this project will unpack the links within and between Indian Ocean regions. Aiming to rethink conventional tropes and methods within area studies, the project positions infrastructures as a novel analytical category for studying the Indian Ocean and will produce one of the first simultaneous multi-sited ethnographies of the region.  

The core research question of the project is: How do infrastructure projects engineer, assert and transform transregional connections and imaginaries across the Indian Ocean?