Coastal Imaginaries

Researchers are invited to submit abstracts for a publication dedicated to how the coast is conceived, perceived and imagined.

The special issue of Sage journal Coastal Studies & Society will explore the idiosyncratic narratives associated with coastal spaces and localities, and the imaginative models or images they evoke.

Coasts form distinctive, liminal spaces, not just meeting points between land and sea, civilisation and wilderness, but also sites of movement and exchange, of tidal ebb and flow, leaving and returning. How does a space defined by hybridity, interaction, and flux alter and enrich our broader understandings of how place, culture, and communities are made and represented? How does our imagining of coastal zones combine but also differ from the way we imagine hinterlands, maritime, or metropolitan spaces?

We encourage an engagement with and critical interrogation of the coastal imaginary through a rich and diverse range of texts and media, and from a broad range of disciplines and approaches. Contributors might consider, but are certainly not limited to the following:

• The coast as a site of leaving and returning, danger and safety, freedom and home, fear and desire.
• Coastal liminality as a space of possibility or potential, the meeting of the known and unknown.
• The coastal as a space for fantastical encounters; folklore, haunting, Gothic returns.
• Fluid borders and boundaries and cultural anxieties; climate, migration, security, sovereignty, and regulation. 
• Representations of coastal and port spaces as sites of ‘otherness’.
• Coastal narratives of cultural and spatial fringes, limits, beginnings and endings.
• The coastal imagined as dynamic, fluid space; cultural flow, drift, churn and spaces of heightened interaction.
• Notions of cultural flotsam and jetsam, of chance, scavenging, the found and repurposed.

Please submit a 200-250 word abstract to the special issue editors, Professor Brad Beaven and Associate Professor Karl Bell, along with a short bio (100 words max), by Monday 20th May 2024. 

Articles will be between 6,000 – 8,000 words (including footnote references), and the article submission deadline will be 31 January 2025. Coastal Studies & Society is Scopus indexed. For the journal’s author submission guidelines please see https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/CLS.