“Coast as Crisis: A Humanities-led Multi-Campus Graduate Working Group on Narratives, Ecologies, and Politics of the California Coast”

George Hegarty
English
UC Davis

Alison Maas
English
UC Davis

The coast of California spans 1,100 miles and its diverse geography is increasingly endangered by a complex of climate related crises. Worldwide rising seas acutely threaten California’s coastal ecologies, infrastructures, and communities. Sea level rise emerges as but one strand in a tangle of contemporary coastal crises, amongst which we may also count chemical and nuclear waste disposal, oil spills, sewage runoff, overfishing, and loss of coastal biodiversity. The fields of environmental humanities and blue humanities both examine how scholars, practitioners, and publics might visualize, imagine, and narrativize large planetary phenomena that seem beyond the domain of everyday life. This working group will take such inquiries as a point of departure to consider how a humanistic approach to immediate coastal problems like beach erosion, flooding, and more can provide a key perspective to the real-world tackling of these crises on California’s coast. Specifically, as a matter of writing these histories into the past of new coastal futures, this collaborative group is working on a digital map that charts more capacious forms of representing the relation of California’s coast to climate change and thus highlights the long-term capacity of humanities scholarship to generate diverse and actionable narratives of places and spaces of crisis.