Down by the Water conference

We would like to invite you to the second in-person conference of Down by the Water that will take place at the University of Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, UK, on the 28th and 29th of November 2024.

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. We focus 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, we explore 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.

See below for the full conference programme.

28 November 2024

16.00 – 16.15: Welcome, tea & coffee

16.15 – 17.00: Keynote by Dr Arturo Rey da Silva (Lecturer in Heritage, University of Edinburgh)

[title to be confirmed]

17.00 – 17.45: Professor Briony McDonagh (Professor of Environmental Humanities, Energy and Environment Institute, University of Hull)

Water Humanities

18.00: Dinner with speakers

29 November 2024

09.30 – 10.00: Introductions, tea & coffee

10.00 – 10.45: Dr Peter Halkon (Emeritus Fellow, University of Hull)

The changing landscape of the Foulness Valley in later prehistory and the Roman period – reflections and recent research.

10.45 – 11.00: Tea and coffee break

Session 1 ‘Socio-economic entanglements in the maritime realm’

11.00 – 11.20: The moral economy of small-scale smuggling among Danish sailors, 1800-2000

Nils Valdersdorf Jensen (Svendborg Museum / University of Southern Denmark)

11.20 – 11.40: The floating timbers: Lagrangian pull towards the coast

Assis Mon Marcelin (University of Hyderabad)

11.40 – 12.00: “Great Quantityes of Good Ground haue been overflowed & drownd”: petitioning around and about the water in early modern England

Hannah Worthen (University of Hull)

12.00 – 12.20: Maritime Trade as a Realm of Entrepreneurial Freedom: The Case of Personae Alieni Iuris in Roman Times

Paolo Costa (University of Genoa)

12.20 – 13.30: Lunch break

Session 2 ‘Cultural significances of maritime landscapes in the past and present’

13.30 – 13.50: Peregrinazioni lagunari: boat hydro-perspectivism to navigate human-water relationship in the Venice Lagoon

Petra Codato (University of Hull)

13.50 – 14.10: Maritime Pilgrimages: Religious Journeys and Sacred Sites of Saint Nicholas

Vedran Obućina (Centre for Interreligious Dialogue)

14.10 – 14.30: Transforming Tides: Sociocultural and Environmental Impacts of Urbanisation in St. Julians, Malta

Justin Attard (University of Malta / Nanyang Technological University)

14.30 – 14.50: Mapping inshore fishing grounds: alternative ways of making the sea exist

Nadia Casabella and Joonwoo Kim (Université libre de Bruxelles and Daegu University)

14.50 – 15.00: Tea and coffee break

Session 3 ‘Historical and cultural understandings of watery experiences’

15.00 – 15.20: Voices of the “Boat People”: Reconstructing the Vietnamese exodus through oral history archives

Saphia Fleury (University of Hull)

15.20 – 15.50: Community Waterscapes: a bottom-up approach to identifying heritage significance in a maritime city

Katerina Velentza, Hannah Worthen, Ed Brookes, Kate Smith, Juan Pablo Winter Sepulveda, Gill Hughes (University of Hull)

15.50 – 16.10: Sounding Rot: Diagnostic Listening for Decay and Danger in the Atlantic Maritime

Robin E. Preiss (New York University)

16.10 – 16.30: ‘The 'Fishing Village New Deal 300 Project' in South Korea: contested understandings of sustainability’

Nadia Casabella and Joonwoo Kim (Université libre de Bruxelles and Daegu University)

16.30 – 16.40: Concluding remarks

Host or Publisher University of Hull Energy & Environment Institute