On the 28th and 29th of November 2024, the in-person conference Down by the Water: Interdisciplinary Studies of Dynamic Shorelines, Maritime Communities and their Boats will take place at the University of Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, UK.

This conference approaches green-blue regions and the communities that live around bodies of water as a point of inquiry, exploring how different coastal, estuarine and oceanic cultures worldwide mediate the relationship between humanity and water. The event focuses particularly on the deep understandings, skills and lifeways that people have developed specific to the places they live, defined in scholarship as ‘local’, ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous knowledge’, including different material cultures, watercraft and methods of shipbuilding, beliefs, folklore traditions, and literature. For pre-modern and indigenous maritime communities their attachment to water, their insular, coastal, lacustrine or riverine environment, as well as the availability of local material resources influenced directly their tangible and intangible heritage as well as their social and economic organisation. Moreover, the event explores maritime communities in the present, along with the growing need to understand how water continues to shape coastal identities, traditions and contemporary heritage – particularly since the decline of many maritime and shipbuilding industries around the world. These questions sit alongside debates and decisions surrounding the loss and preservation of existing cultural heritage and memory due to the impacts of climate change and other environmental deterioration in watery landscapes.

Visit the conference’s Eventbrite for more details and registration: Down by the Water conference.