Living Well with Water Doctoral Focal Awards in the Arts and Humanities

‘Living well with Water’ champions creative, place-based, participatory solutions to the urgent human and planetary health challenge of how we live well with water in a world of rising water risks and growing deprivation. We all need water, and humans have historically settled near water in green-blue regions, here defined as land within ten miles of the seacoast or foreshore of estuaries, deltas, and tidal rivers. These regions are home to some of the world’s largest cities but have always been vulnerable to flooding, pollution, and erosion. Many of the UK’s most disadvantaged communities also cluster around coastlines exposed to heightened water risks (Fernandez-Bilbao et al. 2011). Four of the five most deprived English authorities, according to Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) 2019, are coastal or estuarine, including the two cities, Hull and Liverpool, whose universities lead this consortium. Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of coastal flooding and erosion (IPCC 2021), but it is an environmental injustice that many green-blue communities most at risk are least empowered to adapt. This is why living better with water underpins key UN-SDG goals, and why we urgently need investment, not just in coastal infrastructure, but in community resilience-building programmes that are place-based, participatory, and led by local needs. Addressing this, our consortium works with disadvantaged UK green-blue communities, and within UK Government’s policy frameworks for Levelling Up (2022) and climate change adaptation and resilience (FCERM 2020; NAP3 2023), to harness the creative power of place-based history and heritage to contribute to cultural placemaking and build healthier, happier, water-resilient communities at UK’s green-blue edge. We bring environmental humanities expertise in literature, history, heritage and creative community engagement into conversation with the social, environmental, and health sciences at Universities of Hull (UoH) and Liverpool (UoL), and our consortium builds on ongoing coastal humanities collaborations between UoH and UoL (UKRI Coast-R Network) and benefits from the cross-sectoral expertise of non-HEI partners, the National Trust, Royal Geographical Society, and Tate. Our cross-sectoral training combines collaborative doctoral awards (CDAs), industry placements, and cohort-wide residential training tailored to the transdisciplinary needs of researchers integrating arts and humanities with human and planetary health. Our aims and objectives embed UKRI’s four principles for change – diversity, connectivity, resilience, engagement – to: Aim 1: Widen access to doctoral training among underrepresented groups within disadvantaged UK green-blue regions (‘diversity’): Objective 1.1: use inclusive recruitment and selection, applying best practice from UKRI’s Widening Participation in Postgraduate Research and UoH’s Centre for Water Cultures CDT 1.2: work across non-HEI partners to support cross-sectoral training and mobility 1.3: create a safe, inclusive research environment tailored to individual needs. Aim 2: Engage disadvantaged communities with their green-blue histories and heritage in creative, collaborative, culturally meaningful ways (‘engagement’): Objective 2.1: maximise our reach by match-funding 15 additional doctoral awards 2.2: work with partners to tailor CDAs/ placements to local needs 2.3: promote transdisciplinary, cross-sectoral research practices that are Collaborative, Open, Inclusive, and Non-Extractive (COINE). Aim 3: Deliver doctoral training that crosses sectors (‘connectivity’) and translates research into policy outcomes and public good (‘resilience’): Objective 3.1: invest in disadvantaged green-blue economies by centering our training/partnerships within the communities, histories, and heritage of these regions 3.2: support doctoral projects that are locally embedded and community facing 3.3: work with partners/policymakers to scale up effective place-based resilience building.