Collection
Tangled coastal connections: Ethical tensions in materialities and imaginaries
This collection of papers explores how local situations – in material, social and ecological arenas – shape both the links between coastal urban areas and the ethical discourses being assembled around them. The authors view coastal connections as both objects caught up in multiple projects, and as dynamic materialities or imaginaries. They emphasise the interpretive work going on as actors deploy discourses replete with ethical claims to make sense of multilayered and multi-scalar relations. They investigate how ethics collide in specific settings. The papers focus on ethics at work in diverse settings: governmental narratives assembling a Norwegian seaweed utopia; urban environmental ethics in Aotearoa New Zealand’s first marine spatial planning; coastal ethics eddying around seagrasses in the Mexican Caribbean; materialist ethics of technomolecular flows in coastal cities; and a discursive field of contested ethics discernible in newspaper coverage of the UK’s blue economy. Together, the authors address ethical tensions emerging from new and intensified connectivities and materialities among coasts, cities and seas. They demonstrate that ethical discourses and claims take many forms and take on a different focus, language, objects, connectivities and materialities in specific locations. They evidence hegemonic ethics legitimising interventions in coastal waters but being adapted, diversified and resisted. They show that ethical negotiations pose arenas where decisions can be taken in collectives, so that ethics is essential in imagining potential futures. Our intent is that more attention to ethics and its practices will help (re)think and plan seas, coasts and cities differently.
Editors
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Raúl Acosta Garcia
Researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main. He was awarded his DPhil by the University of Oxford. His research has focused on activism, advocacy networks, environment, and racism. Within the Urban Ethics Research Group, he carried out a project on urban mobility and bicycling advocacy in Mexico City. In his monograph Civil Becomings, he theorized networked efforts by NGOs to influence national and international policies.
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C. Patrick Heidkamp
Professor of Geography in the Department of the Environment, Geography & Marine Sciences at Southern Connecticut State University and an affiliate of the Economic and Social Rights Research Group at the University of Connecticut. He is an environmental economic geographer with research interests in economic rights, uneven development, just transitions/just sustainabilities. Lately much of his work has focused on examining these interests in the context of the Blue Economy and through transdisciplinary action research.
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Oliver Klein
Managing Director of ASG - Agrarsoziale Gesellschaft (Agri-Social Society), Göttingen, Germany. He is an economic geographer with interests in agri-food systems, rural areas, sustainability transitions, and the Blue Economy. Formerly, he was a guest professor of Economic Geography at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich. Further stations of his academic career were the University of Greifswald and the University of Vechta. In his current position, he engages in knowledge transfer and networking on sustainable farming and rural development.
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Gordon M. Winder
Professor of Economic Geography and Sustainability Research at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Germany. An economic and historical geographer, he researches sustainability issues related to resource-based economies and publishes on Blue Economy, resilience, business networks, globalization and geographies of the news. With Marie Aschenbrenner he completed the project 'Urban environmental ethics on the edge of the city’ within the interdisciplinary DFG research network ‘Urban Ethics. Conflicts over good and proper urban living in the 20th and 21st centuries’.
