This article explores the complex impact of climate change on the way coastal futures are imagined, using the example of the first UK coastal community singled out for managed retreat. Drawing on site-specific, lens-based artistic research, Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism is employed to understand how the future comes to matter on a shifting shoreline. The village of Fairbourne, on the west coast of Wales, was selected for this research as it was surrounded by predictions regarding the effects of sea level rise, as well as abounding in stories and ancient legends. Over the last decade the foretelling of the future of this site was constructed and told through a synthesis of scientific knowledge, media coverage, council communication and individual imagination. The article employs insights from new materialist theories and more specifically Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism in order to understand how the material and the discursive co-produce each other, asserting the need for a better understanding of how the discursive affects the material. By collapsing traditional notions of time and space as fixed, distinct categories, this framework reveals how climate futures are actively shaped through different intra-actions on the current shoreline, revealing the future as open and pointing to how we can become responsive to the relations we inhabit. The research highlights connections between imagination, climate change and responsibility that entail a sense of possibility rather than obligation.
Spatial justice concerns not merely how space is distributed and managed, but how accessible spaces and places are in relation to how they are defined and understood. This ontological and epistemological position aims to understand how people relate to space, how they create place and how spaces and places relate to identity. From legal and spatial planning disciplines, spatial justice considers the relationship between space and law. In this research we use spatial justice as an ontological and methodological position to explore spatial imaginaries at the coast. Using a detailed case study of the development of new fishing byelaws affecting the Wye and Usk rivers in Wales, we explore how legislative requirements related to environmental regulation can collide with lived experience of coastal communities and how a spatial justice lens allows for deeper understanding of why coastal regulatory conflicts can occur. We explore the implications of applying spatial justice to coastal space and coastal regulatory decisions before presenting detailed decision process mapping and narrative of the byelaw’s development. Our findings attest to the need to rethink the relationship between laws and values and further to explore ways of building capacity within coastal regulators to manage regulatory processes with increased reflexivity, deliberation and partnership forms of engagement to enable enhanced embodiment of the diverse values in coastal areas.
Agriculture acts as both the means of livelihood and way of life in Coastal Karnataka, where ecological abundance and vulnerability interact dynamically to shape the region. Comprising the districts of Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, and Uttara Kannada, this coastal region has a strong agricultural heritage but is also dealing with a number of challenges, such as land degradation, market instability, climate change, and sociocultural changes. With ramifications for food systems, rural identity, and knowledge transfer across generations, this study examines how agriculture in Coastal Karnataka is changing amid these “edges.” The study explores cropping patterns, the significance of ecological and cultural knowledge, gendered and generational transformations, and the governance structures that impact adaptation through a mixed-methods approach that includes focus groups with a range of stakeholders. Although staple crops like Paddy, Arecanut, Coconut, and pepper continue to play a significant role, farmers are being forced to adapt their methods due to shifting rainfall patterns, salinity of the soil, and a lack of institutional assistance. The investigation illustrates the relationship between farmers’ vulnerability and their ability to adapt, revealing how they balance market-driven decisions with long-standing ceremonial and cultural customs. The study emphasizes the necessity of policy frameworks that acknowledge the cultural uniqueness of the area and the changing agrarian realities, all the while enhancing the knowledge systems at the grassroots level that maintain resilience at the margins.
As they undertake the globe-spanning work of trade and commodity distribution, container ships are often said to exist in the strangely hidden and largely inaccessible networks characteristic of capitalist modernity, literalising globalisation’s metaphors of seamless flow. But what is the effect when this flow is ruptured, and the container ship or the shipping container come to a sudden halt? This article analyses literary texts that reflect on moments when container ships become eerily immobile in coastal waters and when shipping containers make unexpected and unsettling landfall in ports and on beaches. Such sequences hinge on a gothic imaginary that locates the uncanny qualities of the shipping industry not in its haunting invisibility, but in the horrors that attend the too tangible, too material, too abundant presence of ships and their containers. The texts examined here see in the immobility of shipping a suggestive figure for two forms of apocalypse: the end of the world and the end of narrative possibility. Relatedly, the shipping container functions as a hyper-modern iteration of the gothic crypt, an ambivalent site of death and powerfully inscrutable, an object that will not yield the secrets it conveys. Authors under discussion in this article include Horatio Clare, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Emily St. John Mandel, and Lucy Wood.
Different meanings are attributed to the coast and sea. Ideas about broad changes in our relationship with the coast are complicated when attention is given to a specific aspect. This article will argue that a particular place and period, the interwar years in the British Isles, represented a peculiar time in the history of the coastal imaginary. The concept of layered liminality is used to illustrate the way in which the monster was entwined with other physical, social, and political coastal liminalities of the time. By combining a study of sea monsters with notions of the coastal imaginary the study provides another way to explore the meaning of the coast. This article is not concerned with the sea monster found in the middle of the ocean but the monster close to shore. Such beasts thus occupy a liminal geographical as well as ontological space. Understanding the significance of these creatures requires careful consideration of the histories of leisure, popular culture, and international politics as well as that of the monsters themselves. This Fortean aspect of the coast offers another layer of liminality onto the liminal coast and illustrates how the mystery of the sea came ashore.
In this paper, we explore how coastal communities, often portrayed through narratives of risk, socioeconomic decline and displacement, might instead be represented in ways that foreground local identity, resilience and everyday lived experience. Drawing on a community-focused exhibition held in the village of Borth, West Wales, we examine how residents experience, remember and adapt to life on the shifting shoreline. Situated at the frontline of climate change and sea level rise, Borth has frequently been framed by the media and policymakers as a place of vulnerability. Yet interviews and community contributions to the exhibition revealed more complex local perspectives, shaped by a strong sense of identity rooted in Borth’s maritime past, personal connections to the power of the sea, and creative expression at the shoreline. The collaboratively developed exhibition – featuring photographs, objects and local stories – served both as a record of coastal life and as a space for discussion and reflection. By highlighting their long-standing relationships with the sea, residents sought to challenge a sole focus on problem-related narratives, instead emphasising the diversity, complexity and richness of coastal experience. We argue for the value of community-centred, arts-informed approaches in coastal research and adaptation planning, showing how they can promote dialogue, affirm local knowledge, and better support communities navigating environmental change.
This article proposes a new theoretical concept of brackish culture to analyse how coastal imaginaries are co-created through supernatural folklore. Questioning some of the limitations of entanglement as a theoretical approach, it argues that a brackish analogy of a co-mingled, in-between fluid state offers greater analytical potential, especially in relation to littoral spatial cultures. Firstly, it advances a brackish analogical conceptualisation in response to the over-use of entanglement as a means of analysing spatio-cultures. This is developed through recent theorising of relational and affective landscapes, performative space- and placemaking, ecosemiotics, and the supernatural narrativization of place. Secondly, it illustrates the application of a brackish conceptualisation of spatial cultures, focussing on nineteenth-century Cornwall as an area of Britain both rich in tales of coastal haunting and with a strongly defined spatial imaginary. Presenting the coast as an affective and emotional environment negotiated through stories of haunting, it highlights how these tales disturb and merge temporal and spatial boundaries. The third section considers the spatial power politics of coastal folklore, its ability to subvert more mundane spatial imaginaries from within, but also the factors that limited its use to a tacit rather than tactical subversion. The piece concludes with reflections on how a brackish conceptualisation makes an original contribution to coastal studies. Highlighting its potential superiority to notions of entanglement, a brackish concept helps destabilise some of the innate terrestrial biases and rigid conceptual boundaries that inform how we imagine littoral space.
This article explores how Dermot Healy’s writing bridges the gap between the imagined and material dimensions of the Atlantic coastline, offering a distinctive “coastal imaginary” rooted in both lived experience and mythic resonance. In addition to examining how Healy draws upon mythological, biblical, and folkloric traditions to portray the coast as a liminal space of mystery, memory, and transcendence, it also analyses—through close readings of his references to Hy-Brazil and meditations on stone wall-building and geological time—how Healy’s coastal life connected him to the physical realities of erosion, climate, and deep time, grounding his imaginative vision in the tactile and temporal textures of place. Overall, the study argues that Healy’s coastline is neither romanticised nor purely symbolic; rather, it emerges as a volatile, dynamic threshold where land and sea, past and present, dream and material reality converge. In doing so, Healy articulates a coastal imaginary that embraces uncertainty, fluidity and the enduring presence of the inexpressible.
This second special issue on coastal imaginaries explores haunting as a means of analysing how environment, imagination and narrative shape our understanding of littoral spaces. Building on the first issue, and similarly adopting multidisciplinary approaches, it examines underrepresented themes and topics in coastal scholarship. Haunting here is not limited to figurative ghosts but encompasses spatial and temporal disruptions, the merging of past, present, and future, and aspects of the uncanny within coastal environments. The six articles explore topics ranging from nineteenth-century Cornish supernatural folklore to near-future science fiction literature that reads beached cargo containers as gothic crypts. In between, it examines interwar sea monster sightings, the mythic and autobiographical-infused coastal writing of Dermot Healy, an ethnographic study of how Timor-Leste fishing communities are adapting ancestral narratives to environmental change, and artistic practice as a means of exploring haunting pasts and futures in a Welsh coastal village faced with rising sea levels. Collectively, these contributions demonstrate the value of haunting as a critical tool for understanding coastal imaginaries and the emotional, psychological, and cultural dimensions of liminal spaces. Littoral haunting is shown to articulate anxieties about boundaries, ecological futures, and modern consumption, yet also serve as a means of preserving an element of mystery and secrecy within coastalscapes. Shaped in the interaction between physical environments, affective responses, and narrative practices, coastal imaginaries emerge as dynamic ways of articulating a sense of uncertainty, unease, and anxiety at the shoreline.
This paper explores how collaborative ethnography can be part of building resilient coastal communities. It does so by way of a methodological reflection on a collaborative research project that was carried out by the first author together with a Mapuche Lafkenche political organization that is active in the coastal region of southern Chile and is in the process of applying for an Indigenous marine area called ECMPO Wadalafken. The Wadalafken ECMPO Association has been working together with professionals and researchers from different areas to realize diverse actions related to the request for an Indigenous coastal and marine area. Collaboration with actors inside and outside the territory is part of the Association’s strategy to transform social, environmental, and political power relations, restoring Indigenous coastal relations and constructing resilient coastal Indigenous communities. The first author was part of this process as a collaborative ethnographer. In this paper, we first elaborate on how collaborative ethnography was employed in this research project as a way to support the political process of the Wadalafken ECMPO Association. After that, we go on to present the lessons learned from this research project: (1) trust and time are crucial elements of collaborative ethnographic research designs, (2) local political relations and organization shape the options for doing collaborative ethnography, and (3) collaborative ethnographic research can be transformative on different levels. We conclude that collaborative ethnography is best understood as a collaborative space that continuously is under construction and can be both transformative for participating (Indigenous) communities and academic researchers.
Given the need to obtain reliable knowledge to contribute to further reflection on the anthropization of coastal zones, this article focuses on the colonial settlement of the Ilha de Luanda (Luanda Island), a sandspit off the coast of Luanda, the capital of Angola. Despite the strategic importance of the Ilha for the development of the city of Luanda, there are few studies on the relationship between the two elements. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, only the Axiluanda people lived on the island. However, following global trends, from the twentieth century onwards, the island, considered as a leisure space, was integrated into the urbanization process of the city, which led to profound changes in its landscape. Based on a wide range of historical sources, from newspapers to technical reports, this paper traces the history of the Ilha from the arrival of the Portuguese to the independence of Angola. Particular attention is paid to the so-called “late colonial period” (1945–1975), when the island was urbanized and coastal erosion began to destroy the existing infrastructure. Since then, coastal protection has become a major concern, a situation that continues to this day.
This article examines how coastal communities adapt their environmental knowledge in response to climate change and environmental degradation. Drawing on ethnographic research with fishing communities in Timor-Leste, I introduce the concept of ‘sensory recalibration’ to show how communities actively reconstruct their understanding of changing seascapes through collective practices of environmental interpretation. Through participatory mapping workshops and fishing trail documentation, I demonstrate how fishers develop new ways of reading environmental markers while maintaining connections to traditional ecological knowledge. The transformation of two fishing trails—“Black Sand Tuna” and “Grouper’s Ghost”—reveals how communities navigate environmental change through careful negotiation between ancestral knowledge and emerging sensory cues. These practices suggest new ways of understanding coastal imaginaries as dynamic frameworks that evolve through embodied engagement with changing environments. The study advances theoretical understanding of how coastal communities maintain meaningful relationships with place even as familiar environmental markers disappear, while offering methodological insights for examining adaptation through attention to sensory practice and collective meaning-making.
In The Human Shore , John Gillis invites readers to view wind, earth, and water as interconnected elements of a single, dynamic system—the shore—and argues that humanity forms an integral part of this ecological continuum. This perspective deepens our understanding of both the planet and ourselves (236). Building on Gillis’s reflection, this paper turns to Adam Nicolson’s 2017 work of non-fiction, The Seabird’s Cry , suggesting that Nicolson invites readers to imaginatively accompany the inhabitants of coastal shores, embracing their boldness and hospitality. The guiding questions of this inquiry echo those posed by Thom Van Dooren: “What kinds of human–bird relationships are possible at the edge of extinction?” and “What obligations do we have to preserve space in the world for other living beings?” (5). For both Van Dooren and Nicolson, the response lies in attentive engagement with the manifold ways humans become entangled with birds—a practice grounded in the ethical necessity of recognizing our embeddedness within a shared ecological world. Situated at the intersection of environmental awareness and cultural reflection, Nicolson’s nature writing emerges as a vital medium that cultivates wonder and fortifies our emotional and ethical connection to the marine environment and the seabirds that inhabit it.
Small-scale fisheries in the Philippines are characterized by various practices, diverse social identities, and multiple challenges that affect fishers’ well-being. While studies have identified various forms and causes of fishers’ vulnerabilities, less well studied is the role of insecure land tenure in shaping vulnerabilities. Using qualitative methods including seventeen focus group discussions and twenty semi-structured interviews, we investigated the case of migrant fishers situated in six villages in a coastal municipality in Palawan province. The study found that fishers live in geographically disadvantaged locations where they negotiated different land tenure arrangements with the landowners. These locations are significantly linked to poor access to safe drinking water, increased economic cost, and constant threat of eviction. Our study highlights the role of weak land tenure as a significant underlying driver of vulnerability for small-scale fishers, and one that functions as a mechanism for further marginalization in the context of emerging coastal squeeze. In the context of implementing global commitments under the FAO Small Scale Fisheries Guidelines, we suggest that interventions to reduce fishers’ vulnerabilities should include a clear and enforceable tenurial instrument or property right over coastal and foreshore lands for fishing communities.
Our paper contributes to the broader coastal studies literature, proposing a methodology and methods that can enhance young people’s participation in research and policymaking. Framed by the emerging concept of child-friendly blue urbanism and founded on principles of attentiveness and context-responsiveness it sets out a novel approach that foregrounds young people’s contributions as co-researchers, and their lives as embodied and intimately connected to the social and physical fabric of the coast. Drawing on our original research with young people in a small, English coastal town, we explore how a unique focus on children’s emplaced lives offers creative opportunities that can enhance young people’s participation. Logistical and ethical challenges about how to safely navigate and safeguard children in a spatially remote, seasonally reliant seaside location were particularly salient. We discuss how the resulting walking tours, intergenerational postcard exchange, animation and booklet emerged through this process of co-creation and solution building with young people, enabling them to express their views and influence community dialogue. In setting out our distinctive attentive, context-responsive approach we critically explore the unique challenges and creative opportunities emerging from researching with young people in coastal contexts and their potential to realise the ambitions of child-friendly blue urbanism.
Many marine fishing villages in India are transitioning into centres of industrialised fishing where the marine fishers are forced to choose between the use of indigenous and traditional knowledge (ITK; perceived to be outdated, resulting in low turnovers) and the use of accurate scientific advisories (Marine Fishery Advisories; MFAs) disseminated by ESSO-INCOIS (limited by a lack of awareness or practice) to locate potential fishing zones (PFZs) in the open sea. The present investigation provides a ground-level assessment of the existing methods of ITK across 14 fish landing centres (FLCs) in Odisha towards delineating the PFZ by non-motorised (NM) and motorised (MR) crafts fishers of 163 respondents in total. The relative advantages and limitations of the ITK versus the MFA approaches as reflected in the net profits of marine fishers across NM and MR crafts were evaluated through various statistical techniques, for example, correlation matrix, Kruskal–Wallis test, etc. The investigation revealed that a combination of the two approaches significantly correlated with an increase in the profits, providing opportunities to plan for the preservation of the provisioning ecosystem services for marine fish by conforming to stock preservation and diversification through the traditional knowledge of the spawning seasons and the use of MFAs to plan “non-intrusive” routes/windows for fishing with the enhancement of modern technology. The study illustrates that the multiple co-benefits of the ITK + MFA method to delineate PFZs can be useful to achieve the targets of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14b, promote responsible consumption, and enhance health through sustainable human–environment relationships on a long-term basis.
Small-scale fisheries are vital for food security and livelihood in coastal communities but remain highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This study assessed the resilience of small-scale fishers (SSF) in Baganga, Davao Oriental, Philippines, their perceptions, adaptive strategies, and support regarding fisher resilience. Using a semi-structured questionnaire ( N = 50), the authors conducted face-to-face interviews among the fishers of Baculin in Baganga. Four focus groups ( N = 4) composed of 10 to 15 fishers and secondary literature were used to validate the findings of the study. The study identified major climate hazards, for example, typhoons, sea-level rise, flooding, strong winds, and erratic weather patterns affecting the lives of fishers and their families. Our findings revealed that while fishers were aware of climate change impacts and employed coping strategies such as livelihood diversification (driving motor vehicles after fishing, involvement in farm weeding, working as a laborer in construction activities), their resilience was limited by poor social networks, and infrastructure, lack of market access, and insufficient alternative income opportunities. The local government unit assisted by giving financial aid and food packs during times of disasters, but lacked proper training that could enhance their awareness and disaster preparedness for the fishing communities. Their resilience can be enhanced by strengthening fisher cooperatives, providing training and seminars, and improving port, road, and market infrastructure. These findings contribute to localized climate adaptation planning for vulnerable coastal communities like the small-scale fishers of Baganga.
This photo essay foregrounds the mangroves as a metaphor, grounded in its materiality, to explore how communities in the Indian Sundarbans inhabit environmental precarity and negotiate risk. It employs “witnessing” through the metaphor of mangroves, engaging critically with the socioecological complexities of the Sundarbans. Drawing upon frameworks from the environmental humanities, this photo essay positions mangroves as paradigms of ecological adaptation, resilience, and relationality. By embodying flexibility, frugality, and fluidity, mangroves challenge anthropocentric notions of stability and control, serving as material and semiotic figures of “thinking with” for adaptive and survival practices. “ Witnessing like mangroves ” is the methodological operationalisation of this epistemic orientation: a field practice that draws directly on mangrove traits to guide how we comprehend and describe island life. Using visual documentation from the Kumirmari island village located at the Gosaba Block of the Indian Sundarbans, this article interrogates the reductive “risk space” discourse perpetuated by climate change frameworks, which advocate for “managed” and “strategic retreat” from the delta. Instead, this essay foregrounds the nuanced, situated adaptive resilience of local communities, whose intergenerational knowledge and socioecological ingenuity resist linear narratives of crisis and displacement. By navigating the entangled thresholds of land and water, the islanders exemplify a situated engagement with the volatile and hybrid ecologies of the delta that can be explored and captured through visual ethno-graphy techniques.
The recent film The Great Escaper (2022) raised important questions as to how ongoing public memory of World War Two is both embedded within conceptions of coastlines (Dunkirk, Normandy) and how personal memories of the war clash with public commemorations of the conflict; what may be termed ‘coastal trauma’ of individual memory provides a parallel narrative to national, triumphant myth. As this article explores, interrogation of these problematic disparities also raises further questions as to more pervasive instances of coastal trauma. Hierarchies of militarism within British society, inter-generational discord, coastal poverty, displacement and inequality all contribute to the British coast as being a personal, cultural, societal, economic and political battleground. In addressing these issues, this article will demonstrate how The Great Escaper and The Last Rifleman (2023), both based upon the story of Bernie Jordan, a World War Two veteran who absconded from his care home in Hove to attend the Normandy celebrations, situate the coastal realm of the British Isles at the centre of traumatic instances of recent British history, from the ongoing trauma of World War Two, to the effects of Brexit, Covid19 and the recent lurch to the far-right of British politics as it constellates around the British coastline as a multifarious site of physical, mental and ideological battleground.
This article broadens the scope of Victorian urban exploration by extending it from the slums of London’s courts and rookeries to the River Thames, which was both a vital commercial artery and a source of fascination and fear. While the Thames supported imperial trade, it was also associated with poverty, crime, pollution, and moral decay, particularly in the eastern docklands. The article argues that the river offers an alternative perspective for understanding urban social exploration. Unlike the traditional urban landscape, where familiar markers guided explorers, the Thames presented an alien, disorienting environment of decaying warehouses, fog, and muddy riverbanks. This shift to a boat, navigating the treacherous waters of the Thames, took writers into a marine underworld that mirrored themes of criminality and poverty. The river’s oppressive atmosphere led writers to project imperial narratives of civilization versus savagery onto the landscape, blending with the macabre image of the Thames. These encounters were often filtered through an ‘imperial gothic’ lens, wherein the river emerged as a malevolent force that threatened lives, disrupted progress, and corrupted the working-class communities of the eastern districts. By exploring these narratives, the article illustrates how the Thames, as both a literal and symbolic landscape, played a crucial role in shaping the Victorian imagination of urban decay and the tensions between modernity and the perceived threats of the primitive and the criminal.
