Thoiba SAEEDH, Author at ASIAR

Thoiba SAEEDH

PhD candidate, Faculty of Ethnology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München | profile link

I’m a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Ethnology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and I’ve recently been awarded a Wadsworth International Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My dissertation focuses on the cultural impact of the ‘China-Maldives Friendship Bridge’ to explore the socio-political imaginations of local populations interacting with this BRI project. I am interested in the complex ways in which infrastructure acts on bodies (vice-versa) and how that informs changing understandings of social being and identity. I completed my MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh on a British Chevening Scholarship and a BA in Anthropology and Sociology from the University of Melbourne on an Australia Awards Scholarship. I currently serve as the National Programme Coordinator for the Maldives Office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and am also a member of the Senate Board of the Islamic University of the Maldives.

Paving Portions Of The ‘One Road’ Across The Indian Ocean: China’s Highway And Bridge Projects In The Republic Of The Maldives

Infrastructures Group

Our work examines the work of constructing domestic overland roads and bridges within the Republic of the Maldives. This archipelago of atolls stretches across 90,000 square kilometres, but of that vast territory only less than 300 square kilometres is comprised of dry land. The country includes within its territorial waters two major deep-water...