My current and future research is about past and present attempts to comprehend the Atlantic environment and make sense of the coastlines, islands, regions and nations around it. This uses a combination of movement by kayak, traditional archival research, oral history, and conceptual work (engaging with e.g. postcolonial and hydrofeminist thought). It results in several kinds of texts that are different facets of the same larger project. The journey for The Frayed Atlantic Edge was my attempt to throw myself head-first into the environment in which my current research all takes place.
That book is, however, part of a project that has wider practical and political goals. A page on this website – Being Littoral: Rethinking Atlantic Britain & Ireland – explains the kinds of research I’m gathering and how it’s being organised. Please do get in touch d.j.gange@bham.ac.uk if you know examples that might be useful, or have comments/questions about the framing.
Other aspects of the project have included short pieces in books and magazines such as The Big Issue (listed on the page called The Project in Other Media), and the book has also led to a little involvement in policy making; as, for instance an invited contributor to Islands Revival, funded by the James Hutton Institute and the Scottish Government, which sought to establish groundwork for understanding what might constitute healthy cultural and political circumstances for population growth and economic regeneration in the Scottish islands; you can find the declaration produced at that event here.
The project has involved several scholarly articles, exploring the reasoning behind the approach the book takes and the conceptual background from which it emerged. Such articles don’t overlap in content, or tone, with The Frayed Atlantic Edge but are part of the same wider project.
The first two are already available, others will follow:
‘Time, Space and Islands: Why Geographers Drive the Temporal Agenda’, Past & Present (2019)
‘Retracing Trevelyan? Historians and the Archive of the Feet’, Green Letters (2017)
‘Amniotic Oceans: the Feminist Poetics of Island Histories, 1970-2019’ (for Feminist Review special edition on Oceans, April 2020)
‘Being Littoral: Local Coastlines & Global Histories’ (in preparation)
‘The Post-Atlantic: the makings of a postcolonial and posthuman ocean’ (in preparation)
‘Small Boats and Strandlines: Historical Anthropologies of Everyday Coastal Travel’ (in preparation).
The Frayed Atlantic Edge 