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LIMINALWATER - Liminal Waterway Countercultures

public.project.responsible_investigator_cria: Raquel Carvalheira

public.project.responsible_investigator_external: Ben Gidley (Birkbeck, University of London)

public.project.research_group: Circulation and Place-Making


public.project.keyword

Liminality | Waterways | Blue Humanities | Ecological challenges

public.project.institution_funder

HERA – Humanities in the European Research Area; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

public.project.partners

Birkbeck University of London (coord.), University of Southampton, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - University of Zagreb, Karl Franzens University Graz

public.project.state

public.project.open

public.project.start_date

01-02-2025

public.project.end_date

31-12-2026

public.project.reference

CHANSE-CR-132


public.project.abstract

Our five-country LIMINALWATER consortium (Portugal, United Kingdom, France, Austria and Croatia) will analyse the role of liminal waterway countercultures within two intersecting crises: Europe’s largely imaginary crisis of diversification and its very real ecological crisis. Countercultures emerge in Europe’s liminal waterways as a response to these two crises and provide models of resilience against them. We retrieve submerged narratives of how water - figuratively or literally - has been central to ways in which communities, artists, activists and municipal actors have re-appropriated post-colonial, post-fascist and post-socialist urban and natural space and place-based memory. We deploy historical, literary, spatial and ethnographic methodologies to explore these sites of cultural production and conviviality. Focusing on forgotten or peripheral fresh- and saltwater points of resistance to our twin crises, our cases - some historical and some contemporary - are located in the Atlantic riverports of Faro and Liverpool, the Channel ports London and Ostend, the Mediterranean coasts of Marseille, Algiers and the Balkans, and the riverine network linking central Europe to the Aegean and Balkans. The project will work with our Associate Partners - Sciaena (a Portuguese grassroots environmental NGO), the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (Mucem) and the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral in Rijeka (PPMHP).

public.project.team

Ben Gidley (Birkbeck University of London)

Milka Car (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb)

Sami Everett (University of Southhampton)

Yvonne Zivkovic (Karl Franzens University Graz)