SESSION 1<\/strong><\/p>\n9.00 – 9.30: Lynne Pearce & Jen Southern: Introduction – Wet and Dry Ontologies of Seaweed<\/p>\n
9.30 \u2013 10.00: Maria Borovnik: Gazing at the Sea, Longing to be Elsewhere: When seafarers stay at sea for too long<\/p>\n
10.00 -10.10: Nathan Jones: Unsecurities Lab and the Sinking of the Felicity Ace<\/p>\n
10.10-10.20: Serena Pollastri: A seascape epistemology for urban futures that move with the water<\/p>\n
10.20 Discussion<\/p>\n
10.30 Break<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nSESSION 2<\/strong><\/p>\n11.00 Debbie Yare & Jen Southern: Rogue touch and turbidity: conversations with the intertidal zone<\/p>\n
11.10 Ellie Barrett: Nature\u2019s Way of Working Stone: Collecting the coastline with a child<\/p>\n
11.20 Louise Mullagh: Reading the Sands: Walking, Data, and Repertoire Knowledge in Morecambe Bay<\/p>\n
11.30 Amy Dickson: Seaweed Transfer, 2025. screening<\/p>\n
11.40 Jamie Jenkinson: Jelly Beach + TERRA screening & publication<\/p>\n
11.50 Discussion<\/p>\n
12pm Break<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nSESSION 3<\/strong><\/p>\n12.30 Jo Carruthers: Nature’s Play, Micro-Mobilities and Soft Fascination<\/p>\n
12.45 Abi Lafbery: From Sea Gooseberries to Sewage: More-than-human Entanglements in Outdoor Swimming<\/p>\n
1pm Mimi Sheller: Theorizing from Caribbean Seas: tidalectics, mangroves, and sacred passages<\/p>\n
1.30pm Join us for Lunch (in person only!)<\/p>\n
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Session 1<\/h2>\nLynne Pearce & Jen Southern: Introduction: Wet and Dry Ontologies of Seaweed<\/h3>\n
Introducing the theme of Being at Sea<\/em> we will investigate the more-than-human mobilities of seaweed, in both its wet and dried state, in order to extend existing understanding of infrastructure. In contrast to definitions which presume that infrastructure to be inanimate and supremely functional — built by humans in order to serve humans — our more-more-than human approach argues for its potential vitality and, by implication, its need for protection.<\/p>\nLynne Pearce is Professor of Literary Theory and Women\u2019s Writing at the University of Lancaster and co-Director (Humanities) of Cemore. She was instrumental in establishing the field of Mobility Humanities, and since 2012 has published extensively in Mobilities and Cultural Geography. Her most recent book is \u2018Britains Changing Roadscapes: Mobility, Place, Attachment, Loss\u2019.<\/p>\n
Jen Southern is an artist, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and digital media, and co-Director of Cemore at Lancaster University. She specialises in site-specific and participatory digital art, focussing on more-than-human mobilities. She collaborates with artists, technologists, participants and natural systems to produce live installations that combine material and digital experience.<\/p>\n
Maria Borovnik: Gazing at the Sea, Longing to be Elsewhere: When seafarers stay at sea for too long<\/h3>\n
Objectified and normalised as \u2018maritime labour\u2019, seafarers are expected to efficiently move large vessels filled with commodities across the globe. This talk offers a contrasting perspective by positioning seafarers as sentient human beings. The focus is on affects, dreams and memories seafarers engage in while facing the unpredictability and (im)mobilities of life at sea.<\/p>\n
Maria Borovnik is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research interests lie in the intersection of mobilities, development and maritime geographies with a strong focus on seafarers; she is currently exploring the consequences of the crew change crisis experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
Nathan Jones: Unsecurities Lab and the Sinking of the Felicity Ace<\/h3>\n
Unsecurities Lab is a workshop format using immersive art works to engage teams of specialists in foresight on topics of high complexity. This talk focuses on our most recent cycle: SUNK COSTS, based on an artwork about a container ship that set on fire, taking thousands of luxury electric cars to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. <\/p>\n
Nathan Jones is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art (Digital Media) at Lancaster University, and co-editor of the art-language-technology publisher Torque Editions. His work experiments with models for contemporary art as a research environment.<\/p>\n
Serena Pollastri: A seascape epistemology for urban futures that move with the water.<\/h3>\n
This talk will reflect on the tensions between the inherently fluid nature of water and the permanence and rigidity of the hydraulic infrastructures that shape our cities. Drawing from a \u2018seascape epistemology\u2019 (Ingersoll, 2016) I will speculate on amphibious and regenerative approaches as a radical alternative for adaptive urbanism.<\/p>\n
Serena Pollastri is a Lecturer in Urban Futures at ImaginationLancaster at the School of Art (Architecture) and a co-founder of the Coastal Collective. Her practice-based research is concerned with developing and applying design methods and approaches for regenerative coastal futures, particularly through collaborative, hands-on approaches.<\/p>\n
Session 2<\/h2>\nDebbie Yare & Jen Southern: Rogue touch and turbidity: conversations with the intertidal zone<\/h3>\n
The sea shore is changing rapidly at Red Bank, in an area that was once salt marsh. Searching for complexity rather than clarity we will discuss creative and mobile approaches to participatory research with the rich interactions of rock, algae, mud, barnacles and shrimps as they start to take hold in this evolving ecosystem.<\/p>\n
Debbie Yare’s art practice moves with, and is shaped by the more-than-human Morecambe Bay, where she lives. Recent work has considered salt marsh ecology, coastal change, the archive, and seaweed. She works between and across media with interests in video, photography, writing, drawing, performance and socially engaged practice.<\/p>\n
Ellie Barrett: Nature\u2019s Way of Working Stone: Collecting the coastline with a child<\/h3>\n
This presentation traces entanglements between sculpture making, maternal care and embodied experiences of water and the shore. An ongoing collaboration with my four-year-old daughter introduced the practice of collecting as an artistic method, which draws together Henry Moore\u2019s sculptural making processes alongside young children\u2019s knowing and becoming via engagement with coastal landscapes.<\/p>\n
Ellie Barrett is a sculptor, writer, researcher and artist-mother with a specialism in socially-engaged sculpture. She is currently working with the Henry Moore Foundation to develop a new early years\u2019 programme; and Burnley Civic Trust and Blaze Arts on a public realm commission, co-produced with young people in Burnley.<\/p>\n
Louise Mullagh: Reading the Sands: Walking, Data, and Repertoire Knowledge in Morecambe Bay<\/h3>\n
Data-driven accounts of place have a particular authority, but the sand of Morecambe Bay expose their limits. The channels shift, the tides move faster than a galloping horse and no dataset can keep pace. This presentation explores what walking reveals that data cannot; embodied, mobile, repertoire knowledge of place.<\/p>\n
Louise Mullagh is Lecturer in Performance and Place at Lancaster University. Her research explores how embodied, sensory encounters with place produce forms of knowledge that data-driven approaches cannot replicate. Working on and around Morecambe Bay, she uses walking as both methodological and theoretical practice to argue for the value of repertoire knowledge in an increasingly datafied world.<\/p>\n