Conversing with Caribbean and Northern Scottish Landscapes and Lifescapes

Abstract

This conversation–and the 2015 Landscapes and Lifescapes Symposium (in Inverness) out of which it grew—offers a starting point for us to collaboratively explore transatlantic histories and geographies and to open up other interdisciplinary conversations addressing how we understand our relationships to identity, history and place. The discussion addresses five key questions that provide a broad scope for thinking about how the relationships between the Anglo-Caribbean and Northern Scotland have been depicted historically, and how the idea of landscapes and lifescapes may help us to diversify this dialogue further. These questions are: 1) what can we learn from investigating the entangled histories and geographies of Scotland and the Anglophone Caribbean; 2) how are these two places—and the islands that surround them—linked; 3) how do we shift depictions of Scottish history to include Caribbean people, movements, systems and perspectives; 4) what is lost in representations of the Caribbean and Scotland as ‘peripheral’ British territories; and, 5) what role can community-based collaborative research projects play in our societal understanding of landscapes and lifescapes (in all forms) in both regions