Coastal Studies & Society

Editorial

It is our ambition that Coastal Studies and Society will be the leading hub for world research in coastal studies. The journal will be the forum for a wide-ranging cooperation between coastal humanities and social science research and other fields of human knowledge, promoting new alignments able to challenge older agendas and methodologies, and propose new ones. It will cater to a growing and vibrant area of scholarly work that is currently scattered and will find here a common place for shared encounters and synergies.

Coasts are, by definition, adjacent to large bodies of water. This has made it difficult to carve out a space for discussion of coasts as distinct from oceans, and of coastal studies as something distinct from maritime studies. We aim to coordinate and direct sustained attention to the relationship between the land and sea and society, that comprises a nature-culture hybrid territory which has appeared at the periphery of so many academic inquiries, but at the centre of too few. The new approaches to the coast are diverse, but they share an enhanced concern for the local, the adjacent, or the domestic, discriminating between the fine gradations of coastal experience. They may also approach local specificities as the basis for the travelling ideas, people, animals, plants and assets that explain the role of coasts as open global interfaces. All of these themes can be considered across disciplines, and at different temporal and spatial scales. Therefore, we will seek comparisons when possible, without assuming that all coasts should necessarily resemble each other.

We take the concept of ‘coastal’ at its broadest sense, potentially including estuaries, major rivers and inland seas, archipelagos and interstitial ecotones, as well as communities, spaces and people connected to the coast, and concepts of identity, nationhood and interconnectivity across all forms of watery borderlands. Rather than positing a single ideal ‘coast’, we will emulate the field of island studies and assume that there will be many different coasts in different contexts, shaped by human agency and by more-than-human influences, requiring multi-lens perspectives.

The editors are open to submissions from across the full spectrum of the humanities and social sciences. We are also particularly interested in interdisciplinary collaborations that overcome customary academic and institutional barriers and stimulate dialogue and exchanges across different knowledge domains, encouraging contributions that holistically address the complex interactions of the coastal realms. While we expect to publish an eclectic range of articles with varied themes, methodologies and approaches, subject matter might include: port towns and urban cultures; built environment and urban planning; rural coasts; littoral societies; fisheries; indigenous contexts; traditional knowledge; “more than human” or animal-centered interpretations; wet ontologies; risk, vulnerability, and resilience in the anthropocene; “coastal squeeze” in the context of sea level rise and other pressures; coastal management; sustainability and conservation; structural inequalities; migration; gender and sexuality; leisure and sport.

In the spirit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, we will welcome submissions that deepen our understanding of coastal pasts, but also those that confront the challenges of the coastal present, or explore possible coastal futures in an era of sea level rise and climate crisis.