A consortium of researchers is mapping forgotten waterways across Europe—from Liverpool’s docks to the Balkan coast—to uncover how communities, artists, and activists have used these liminal spaces to resist both cultural division and ecological collapse. This matters because Europe faces two intersecting crises: a manufactured crisis of diversification (the idea that multiculturalism is failing) and a very real ecological crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss. The researchers argue that countercultures emerging along Europe’s marginal waterways—post-colonial, post-fascist, and post-socialist sites—offer models of resilience that mainstream narratives have submerged. Current scholarship rarely connects these two crises or examines how water itself has shaped convivial, resistant cultural production across multilingual sites. If successful, the project will produce digital audio-visual material for each site, including virtual “walks” and cartographic resources that allow non-academic users to visualise these waterways and the flows between them. It will culminate in a museum exhibition at the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral in Rijeka. The impact is primarily cultural and historical: it aims to create future knowledge resilience in frontline nodes of climate crisis and migrational shift, giving policymakers, activists, and local communities concrete examples of how marginal spaces have fostered solidarity and adaptation.
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Our five-country LIMINALWATER consortium will analyse the role of liminal waterway countercultures within two intersecting crises: Europe’s largely imaginary crisis of diversification and its very real ecological crisis. Countercultures emerge in Europe’s liminal waterways as a response to these two crises, and provide models of resilience against them. We retrieve submerged narratives of how water - figuratively or literally - has been central to ways in which communities, artists, activists and municipal actors have re-appropriated post-colonial, post-fascist and post-socialist urban and natural space and place-based memory. We deploy historical, literary, spatial and ethnographic methodologies to explore these multilingual sites of cultural production and conviviality, through which tides of people, ideas and objects flow. Focusing on forgotten or peripheral fresh- and saltwater points of resistance to our twin crises, our cases - some historical and some contemporary - are located in the Atlantic riverports Faro and Liverpool, the Channel ports London and Ostend, the Mediterranean coasts of Marseille, Algiers and the Balkans, and the riverine network linking central Europe to the Aegean and Balkans. Working with our Associate Partners - Sciaena (a Portuguese grassroots environmental NGO), the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (Mucem) and the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral in Rijeka (PPMHP) - our project will produce digital audio-visual material on each site (including virtual “walks” through each as well as cartographic resources enabling non-academic users in and beyond our sites to visualise them and flows between them), and culminate in a museum exhibition at PPMHP, creating future cultural knowledge resilience in frontline nodes of climate crisis and migrational shift.
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