For the second workshop on 17 September 2022, the Scottish Shores collaborators came together to share reflections and work in progress on their research into Scottish littoral and coastal environments, Gothic and Folklore Studies, and the Blue Humanities.
This workshop showed how we had begun to put together new ideas and approaches deriving from the different fields we discussed in Workshop I, to produce novel research on Scottish coasts in culture. We particularly noticed how our thinking was diversifying from literature into objects, artefacts, visual media, and infrastructure – and how our findings were taking in politics, economics, industry, and identity.
We also noticed the urge in our explorations to reach out beyond Scottish Shores, to examine connections with other histories and areas of the globe. This would become the focus of our third event: the research symposium ‘Casting Off’.
Today’s presentations:
Travelling Theories & Legos:
Alex Campbell – “Logistical Turbulence in Brackish Times”
Timothy Baker – “Dragons on the Shore: LEGO, Beachcombing, and the Material Text”
Nordic EcoGothic (Dis)Embodiments:
Monica Germanà – “‘Skeleton Wumman’: Haunted Underwater from Scotland to the Arctic”, see here references for this paper, kindly shared by Monica.
Jimmy Packham – “Edinburgh and the Whales”
Folklore & Labour in the British Isles
Karl Bell – “Toil and Terror: Narrating Sea and Self in Nineteenth-Century Scottish Coastal Folklore”
Militarising & Selling Scottish Shores:
Emily Alder – “Unsafe Shores: Trident and Coastal Security in the BBC’s Vigil (2021)”
Giulia Champion – “Commodifying Scottish Shores: Oil, Whiskey & Windfarms in the Gothic Imagination”
See the full programme and abstracts here.