Editorial

Coastal Studies & Society

2022, Vol. 1(1) 3–9
Coastal studies and society: © The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/26349817211047765
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The encounter between liquid blue and brown sand is not made to last. But when it happens it is
perfect, magical, intense. The rumor of the waters, the touch of the foam, the smell of salt, invite
to dance, there in that wet empty land. Two elements passing through each other’s lives, crossing
for brief moments only, while the waves spread along the beach, before returning to the sea.

Coastal Studies is at home in the shallow waters (bays, coves, estuaries, firths, fjords,
inlets), but it also speaks to interstitial watery realms of all sorts (straits and portages; re-
ticulated systems of lakes, rivers, or inland seas; archipelagos or island clusters). With its focus
on the local, the adjacent, and the domestic, it is grounded in the specificities of physical
places, searching at the same time to relate these to the wider world. Coastal Studies is
especially well-suited to investigating the range of subject matter that is sometimes over-
looked as “not-quite-oceanic,” yet “not-quite-terrestrial.” Its ambition is to embrace the entire
array of human or more-than-human elements imbricated in these hybrid spaces.
Despite their ubiquity, shallow water, sandy tracts, and waterfronts in particular are too often
overlooked, or even disparaged. Perhaps this is simply because of their ambiguous placement,
permeable nature, or intermediate location. Perhaps something more complex may be at work.
In his essay “Brown,” Steve Mentz has argued that the nouns, verbs, and adjectives which
adhere to the textures of these spaces (“ooze,” “seep,” “mire”) sometimes betray a visceral
discomfort, an equation of “soupy, smelly” spaces with digestion, excretion, or decay which
may subtly inform the thinking of ordinary citizens, policymakers, and academics, leading to
ambivalence or disdain.1 Acknowledging and embracing the inherent muddiness of our subject
matter, we consider the outer limits of Coastal Studies to be incremental and shaded in both
directions, like the coast itself. Coastal Studies topics are exactly the ones that could fall “either
way,” as they share the fluidity of the waves spread across the beach and the versatility of
circulating sediments. Indeed, as Michael Pearson observed a generation ago, “how far does the
coast extend inland?” is a research question, not a matter of definition.2 If we think of coasts as
cultural spaces and legal entities as well as material environments, then clearly the answer must
also vary in different countries and historical eras.3

1
Steve Mentz, ‘Brown,’ in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 193–212; see also Steve Mentz, Ocean (New York and London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
2
Michael Pearson, ‘Littoral Society: The Case for the Coast,’ The Great Circle 7, no. 1 (1985): 1–8.
3
Here, our approach is indebted to work such as Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Godfrey Baldacchino, ed. A World of Islands: An Island
Studies Reader (Charlottetown, PEI: Island Studies Press, 2007).
4 Coastal Studies & Society 1(1)

John Gillis warned against the inherent limitations of any history that began and ended
on land. If history suffered from these landlocked preconceptions, shifting the emphasis to
the deep blue offered one avenue of escape.4 Yet, as Gillis remarked more recently, it is
high time to stop considering the shore simply as “the edge of something else” or as
peripheral to another inquiry, whether maritime or terrestrial.5 With as many as 675
million human beings living in a low-elevation coastal area in the year 2000 and 879 to
949 million being expected in 2030, coasts are a relevant matter for a very large number of
people today.6 The urgency of coastal issues is only exacerbated by risks raised by global
warming and sea-level mean rise. These trends threaten some of the world’s biggest cities,
and every coastal region must reckon with land loss (whether through erosion or sub-
mersion), superficial aquifer and soil salinization, and the depletion of ecosystems’
productivity. Sea-level rise puts many human values and activities in jeopardy as well.7
Despite the high economic, social, and cultural stakes in this area, matters relating to
environmental and climate phenomena and their impacts on coastal ecosystems and pop-
ulations have traditionally fallen within the scope of the natural sciences. These study the
physical processes of the environment, characterizing the evolution of coastal zones, based on
the analysis of data, such as micro-fauna, flora, sediments, geomorphology, currents, waves,
tides, climate, and astronomical influences. Scientists are able to take into consideration the
impacts of human activities in the coastal dynamic, or to acknowledge the full influence of
humans as forcing mechanisms. But, they are less well-equipped to contextualize human
values, behaviours and practices in their specific economic, political and social frameworks,
particularly when connected to events that took place in the past, or that belong to a different
array of disciplines.8 Places and resources have cultural and symbolic values and repre-
sentations for people that are not easily translated into numbers, put into computer analysis or
apprehended through global model perspectives. Knowing how (physical) environments
work is not enough; they have to be considered also as living spaces and imagined futures,
features that are embedded in local cultural practices and meaning-making traditions.9

4
John R. Gillis, ‘Filling the Blue Hole in Environmental History,’ Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 3 ‘The
Future of Environmental History. Needs and Opportunities’ (2011): 16–18.
5
John R. Gillis, ‘Afterword: Beyond the Blue Horizon,’ in Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge, ed.
Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 268, quoted in Nicholas
Allen, Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 9. See also John R.
Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
6
Barbara Neumann, Athanasios Vafeidis, Juliane Zimmermann and Robert Nicholls, ‘Future Coastal Population
Growth and Exposure to Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Flooding - A Global Assessment,’ PLOS ONE 10, no. 3
(2015) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0118571
7
J. Pat Doody, ‘Coastal Squeeze—An Historical Perspective,’ Journal of Coastal Conservation 10 (2004): 129–138.
8
Joana G. Freitas and João A. Dias, ‘The Contribution of History to Coastal Zone Management,’ in Energy &
Environmental Transformations in a Globalizing World. An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. Sophia Kalantzakos
and Nikolaos Farantouris (Athens: Nomiki Bibliothiki, 2015), 204.
9
Mike Hulme, ‘Problems with Making and Governing Global Kinds of Knowledge,’ Global Environmental
Change 20 (2010): 558–564; Joana G. Freitas, Maria Rosário Bastos and João A. Dias, ‘Traditional Ecological
Knowledge as a Contribution to Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation: The Case of the Portuguese Coastal
Populations,’ in Walter Leal Filho et al. (eds.), Handbook of Climate Change Communication, vol. 3 (Springer
International Publishing, 2018), 258.
Freitas et al. 5

Fortunately, in recent years, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have taken
their own coastal turn, offering not a single new insight but a panoply of fresh approaches.
In keeping with their origin in various fields of study, the new approaches to the coast go
by diverse names: maritime cultural landscape, blue humanities, wet ontology, kystkultur,
the paramaritime, the hydrosocial, seasideness, littoral society, coastal history and even
terraqueous history.10 The recent proliferation of thought-pieces and attempts to articulate a
new vocabulary points to an unlikely conclusion: The coastal realm is among the last
remaining academic areas that might be described as under-theorized. The appearance of so
many edited volumes as well as special issues of journals focusing on one or more aspects of
coastal studies, many of which adopt a strongly interdisciplinary approach, is another
indication that these converging flows have crested and overtopped a tipping point.11
The humanities’ interest in coastal studies is a late arrival, considering that coastal
geology, coastal ecology, coastal geography, and coastal engineering are all established
academic disciplines, with their own degree programmes, endowed chairs, and major
peer-reviewed journals. The advent of humanities to these specific studies should not be
seen as competition or as an infringement on the territory of other disciplines, but as an
opportunity for fostering collaboration in order to achieve more integrated and holistic
approaches. The coastal theme is a natural integrator of interdisciplinary synthesis. On the

10
Christer Westerdahl, ‘The Maritime Cultural Landscape,’ International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 21,
no. 1 (1992): 5–14; Gérard Le Bouëdec, ‘La pluriactivité dans les sociétés littorales XVIIe-XIXe siècle,’ Annales
de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 109, no. 1 (2002): 61–90; Michael Pearson, ‘Littoral Society: The Concept
and the Problems,’ Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353–373; Isaac Land, ‘Tidal Waves: The New
Coastal History,’ Journal of Social History 40, no. 3 (2007): 731–743; Steve Mentz, ‘Toward a Blue Cultural
Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature,’ Literature Compass 6, no. 5 (2009):
997–1013; Jamie Linton and Jessica Budds, ‘The Hydrosocial Cycle: Defining and Mobilizing a Relational-
Dialectical Approach to Water,’ Geoforum 57 (2014): 170–180; David Jarratt, ‘Sense of Place at a British Coastal
Resort: Exploring ‘Seasideness’ in Morecambe,’ Tourism 63, no. 3 (2015): 351–363; Silke Reeploeg, ‘Nordic
Border Crossings: Coastal Communities and Connected Cultures in Eighteenth-Century Norway, Scotland, and
Canada,’ Scandinavian-Canadian Studies/Études Scandinaves au Canada 23 (2016): 28–47; Alison Bashford,
‘Terraqueous Histories,’ Historical Journal 60, no. 2 (2017): 253–272; Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg,
‘The ocean in excess: Towards a More-Than-Wet Ontology,’ Dialogues in Human Geography (2019): 1–15.
11
For example: Carola Hein, ed. Port Cities: Dynamic Landscapes and Global Networks (New York: Routledge,
2011); D. Catterall and J. Campbell, eds., Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social
Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500-1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); special issue of Atlantic Studies 10, no. 2
(2013) on ‘Oceanic Studies’; special issue of Environmental History, 18, no. 1 (2013) on ‘New Directions in
Marine Environmental History’; special issue of Isis 105, no. 2 (June 2014) on ‘Knowing the Ocean’; Brad
Beaven, Karl Bell and Robert James, eds, Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the
Waterfront, c. 1700-2000 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); David Worthington, ed. The New Coastal
History: Cultural and Environmental Perspectives from Scotland and Beyond (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2017); Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith, eds., Coastal Works: Culture of the Atlantic Edge (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017); special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly 45, No. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2017),
‘At Sea’; special issue of Comparative Literature (2017) on ‘Ocean Routes’; special issue of Configurations (Fall
2019) on ‘Science Studies in the Blue Humanities’; special issue of Humanities (2019) on blue comparative
literature; special issue of Journal of Transnational American Studies 10, no. 1 (2019) on ‘Archipelagoes/Oceans/
American Visuality’; Margaret Cohen and Killian Quigley, eds., The Aesthetics of the Undersea (London:
Routledge, 2019). See also Emma McKinley, Tim Acott, and Katherine L. Yates, ‘Marine Social Sciences:
Looking Towards a Sustainable Future,’ Environmental Science and Policy 108 (2020): 85–92; Maarten Bavnick
and Jojada Verrips, ‘Manifesto for the Marine Social Sciences,’ Maritime Studies 19 (2020):121–123.
6 Coastal Studies & Society 1(1)

brink of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–
2030), considering that coasts are the place where the ocean impacts human lives the most,
policy makers will turn to scientific data and professional bodies of expertise for advice. At a
time of climate crises and rising demands for social justice, the social sciences and humanities
must have a role in these discussions. A flagship interdisciplinary journal to represent and
consolidate this confluence of new and promising approaches is timely. Indeed, it is overdue.
The background to Coastal Studies & Society stems from a number of emerging scholarly
networks, conferences and publications, but primarily it originated in the Port Towns and
Urban Cultures (PTUC) research group, which was established in 2010 by historians based at
the University of Portsmouth, UK (http://porttowns.port.ac.uk). The aim of PTUC was to
provide a platform for scholars working in social and cultural maritime history to move beyond
“treating the port town as merely the sluice gate regulating how the mighty oceanic flows
interact with the mainland”, and instead place these intersections of maritime and urban space
at the centre of the inquiry.12 In the course of developing scholarly networks on this theme, it
was found that the term ‘maritime’ itself created more problems than it solved, and the group
found itself looking for a new paradigm altogether. Coastal studies offered the solution.
Like the definition of coast itself, we came to recognize that what the adjacent, the
local, or the domestic might mean varied considerably depending on location and context.
The new appraisals of “sailortown,” for example, had undertaken a fruitful re-evaluation
of waterfront neighbourhoods along these lines.13 Yet the rich new lines of inquiry into the
study of beach leisure–including surfing and sunbathing–also concerned themselves with
the adjacent, the local, and the domestic, but pursued this through a strikingly different set
of research questions, source materials, and conclusions.14 Rural coasts were, if anything,
even more varied than their urban counterparts, and when scholars as diverse as
Bathsheba Demuth, Jenia Mukherjee, and Sharika Crawford (to mention only three

12
Isaac Land, ‘Doing Urban History in the Coastal Zone,’ in Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International
Histories of the Waterfront, c 1700-2000, eds. Brad Beaven, Karl Bell and Robert James (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016), 265.
13
Valerie Burton, ‘Boundaries and Identities in the Nineteenth-Century English Port: Sailortown Narratives and
Urban Space,’ in Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850, ed. Simon Gunn and Robert
J. Morris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 137–151; Isaac Land, ‘The Humours of Sailortown: Atlantic History meets
Subculture Theory,’ in City Limits: Perspectives on the Historical European City, ed. Glenn Clark et al. (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 325–347; Brad Beaven, ‘The Resilience of Sailortown Culture in English
Naval ports, c. 1820–1900,’ Urban History 43, no. 1 (2015): 1–24; Robert James, ‘Cinema-Going in a Port Town,
1914–1951: Film Booking Patterns at the Queens Cinema, Portsmouth,’ Urban History 40, no. 2 (2013): 315–335;
Karl Bell, ‘Civic Spirits? Ghost Lore and Civic Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Portsmouth,’ Cultural and Social
History 11, no. 1 (2014): 51–68; Graeme Milne, People, Place, and Power on the Nineteenth-Century Waterfront:
Sailortown (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Tytti Steel, ‘Encounters on the Waterfront: Negotiating Identities
in the Context of Sailortown Culture,’ in Brad Beaven et al., eds. Port Towns and Urban Cultures (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016), 111–132.
14
Krista Comer, Surfer Girls and the New World Order (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010);
Caroline M. Ford, Sydney Beaches: A History (Sydney: New South Books, 2014); Scott Laderman, Empire in
Waves: A Political History of Surfing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Andrew Kahrl, The Land
Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2016); Carina Breidenbach, et al., eds., Narrating and Constructing the Beach: An Interdis-
ciplinary Approach (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2020).
Freitas et al. 7

examples) interrogate the adjacent, the local, and the domestic, it is wisest to keep an open
mind about what questions will be asked and what answers may emerge.15
In that spirit, we expect–and welcome–a wide, eclectic range of submissions. There is,
undoubtedly, an occupational coast (agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries, pluriactivity, salt
production, ship-building, seafaring, trading, merchant shipping, industries), and we
would not wish to exclude this important subject matter–whether in itself, or in its in-
tersections with other areas. However, Coastal Studies & Society is particularly com-
mitted to publishing scholarship which has historically been underrepresented, or has
lacked a clear, highly-visible “home” journal in either the humanities or the social
sciences. Examples of such topics and themes include:

· The ecological coast (watersheds, lakes, sand, waves, currents, wind, fauna and
flora, storms, river deltas, erosion, accretion, flooding, tsunamis, pollution);
· The urban coast (port towns, waterfronts, resorts, real estate speculation, property
rights, insurance, disaster relief);
· The political coast (nations, governmentality, frontiers, waterborne migrants, social
justice, exclusive economic zones, resources, regulation, control and exploitation,
lifesaving and humanitarian considerations);
· The cultural coast (myths, legends, traditions, literature, identity, cosmopolitanism,
religion, leisure, sports, cinema, music, visual representations, tourism, the heritage
industry, contested memory);
· The engineered coast (dredging, land reclamation, harbours, dockyards, artificial
beaches and islands, groynes, seawalls, pipelines, offshore oil rigs, wind farms);
· The managed coast (legislation, uses, conflicts, sustainability, conservation, ad-
aptation, post-industrial redevelopment);
· The future coast (eco-fiction, amphibious architecture, prospective model sce-
narios, geoengineering, resilience, retreat, building with or opening space for
nature).

To be sure, the potential scope of coastal studies is broader than any such schematic
list. Not only do many of these topics naturally blend together or exist only in dialogue
with each other, there are important categories of analysis–such as gender and sexuality–
which could be inflected by any of the subheadings above, or vitally inform an inquiry
into any of them. Similarly, certain events, such as the founding of the Beach Erosion
Board in the United States in 1930–because they are an assertion of power and an exercise
in the production of knowledge–can themselves exert a transformative effect upon basic

15
Epeli Hau’ofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008); Karin E.
Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); David
Gange, The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel (London: William
Collins 2019); Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York:
W.W. Norton, 2019); Jenia Mukherjee, ‘No Voice, No Choice: Riverine Changes and Human Vulnerability in the
‘Chars’ of Malda and Murshidabad,’ Occasional Paper No. 28, (Kolkata: Institute of Development Studies,
2011) http://idsk.edu.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/OP-28.pdf accessed 24 November 2020; Sharika D.
Crawford, The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
8 Coastal Studies & Society 1(1)

assumptions about the world.16 Such an entity, that appeared at the intersection of
emerging leisure practices, urban planning, scientific research, and real estate speculation,
brought policy expectations into being, while on the other hand assigning a particular role
to nature and the natural order. In that spirit, we recognize that terms such as “the cultural
coast,” “the political coast,” or “the ecological coast” must be defined–or, indeed,
challenged, interrogated, and set aside–according to the needs of a particular method of
inquiry, and a specific location in space and time.
No matter the approach, the challenge, going forward, is to develop an analytical multi-
lens trans-chronological framework to include the entire array of natural-human coastal
experiences. In addition to conventional articles and “state of the field” review essays,
Coastal Studies & Society will, from time to time, also publish in formats which take
advantage of the flexibility of an online journal. Although maritime specialists sometimes
lament “sea blindness” (the wilful or unwitting ignorance of oceanic space), it is worth
noting that coasts are often extremely visible, and this visibility and accessibility–
however problematic–deserves close and critical examination in its own right.17 Photo
essays, as well as practitioner-, pedagogy-, or policy-oriented pieces, offer multimedia
modalities particularly well-suited for showcasing projects grounded in fieldwork, oral
history, public history, museology, or conservation psychology.
Taking inspiration from the Swedish expression “one boot in the boat, and the other
in the field,” Coastal Studies & Society is particularly interested in exploring the
hybridity between environments, people, activities and things, on and across the
margins where water encounters land, and along all the possible articulations between
them.18 If you find coastal studies ambiguous, that is not a bug; it is a feature of the
software. Emulating the messy, intermediate spaces which we study, we hope to provide
a space where processes, theories and lived experiences related to the coast can all be
shared in one place, and mutually benefit from the unexpected juxtapositions that result.
Indeed, it is precisely this untidiness and liminality which makes a coastal position the
perfect spot from which to launch less conventional research and narratives, or con-
template fresh possibilities.19
It is fitting, at a time when we confront the threat of a cascading environmental and
humanitarian crisis centred on the low-elevation communities closest to the world’s
shorelines, that a new vision has emerged which puts that very coastal zone at its centre.
While the scope of the crisis is daunting, it is also now possible to discern an emerging rich

16
Elsa Devienne, La ruée vers le sable: Une histoire environnementale du littoral de Los Angeles au XXe siècle
(Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020), 112–115, forthcoming in English as The Sand Rush: An Environmental
History of the Los Angeles Beaches in the Twentieth Century from Oxford University Press.
17
Kim McQuaid, ‘Selling the Space Age: NASA and Earth’s Environment, 1958–1990,’ Environment and
History 12, no. 2 (May 2006): 127–163; Belinda Wheaton, ‘Identity, Politics, and the Beach: Environmental
Activism in Surfers Against Sewage,’ Leisure Studies 26, no. 3 (2007): 279–302; Antony Adler, Neptune’s
Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), see especially
the discussion of museums, aquaria, and marine coastal research stations; A. M. Dietsch, K. E. Wallen, S.
Clayton, H. E. Kretser, G. T. Kyle, Z. Ma, and A. Vercammen, ‘New Directions in Conservation Psychology at a
Critical Time,’ Conservation Biology 34, No. 6 (2020): 1335–1338.
18
The Swedish expression is quoted in Gillis, Human Shore, 273.
19
Mentz, Ocean.
Freitas et al. 9

and provocative set of creative thinking about coastal pasts, the coastal present, and
possible coastal futures. Not since the days of Fernand Braudel has there been such a clear
sense that a comprehensive reconsideration of watery subject matter was imminent. Our
ambition for Coastal Studies & Society is to offer a forum for all of these scholars and
practitioners–with their different origins, experiences and purposes–to meet and learn
from each other. We seek to encourage methodological, thematic and topical experi-
mentation within and across the disciplines. The challenges of the 21st century require
nothing less. We invite you to join us.

Joana Gaspar de Freitas

School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal

Robert James
University of Portsmouth, UK

Isaac Land
Indiana State University, USA