Amimoto Ingersoll, Karin, PhD,is an independent scholar, writer, and surfer based in Honolulu, Hawaii. She was born and raised on O’ahu, Hawai‘i. She received her BA from Brown University in history and international relations in 1996, her PhD from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in indigenous politics in 2009, and was the recipient of the Hawai‘i-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2010. She has published a short story entitled, “An Oceanic Nation,” in Indigenous Encounters: Exploring Relations Between People in the Pacific, her first book, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology, by Duke University Press, and “Sea Ontologies” in The Post-Development Dictionary. Her book Waves of Knowing marks a critical turn away from land-based geographies to center the ocean as place. Developing the concept of seascape epistemology, Amimoto Ingersoll articulates an indigenous Hawaiian way of knowing founded on a sensorial, intellectual, and embodied literacy of the ocean.In relocating Hawaiian identity back to the waves, currents, winds, and clouds, Ingersoll presents a theoretical alternative to land-centric viewpoints that still dominate studies of place-making and indigenous epistemology. Karin is the mother of two young boys, teaches summer school, and writes in her spare time.
[Abstract]   [Video lecture]