Overview
This project explores how Britain’s coasts rekindle ancient water memories, emotional wellbeing, and mythic connections to place. Blending sensory ethnography, folklore, and creative storytelling, it invites a student to uncover how people find healing, belonging, and ecological imagination through their encounters with water. A unique opportunity to fuse research with creative practice.
About this opportunity
Britain’s coasts and rewilded wetlands are sites where sensory experience, ecological change, and cultural memory meet. Encounters with water through swimming, walking, or observing restored wetlands often evoke deep emotional responses and can reconnect people with older symbolic and mythic understandings of the coastal environment. Research in environmental psychology and cultural geography shows that blue-space experiences foster wellbeing, place attachment, and memory-rich engagement with landscape, while ethnographic studies reveal how watery places hold
layered cultural meaning and ancestral imaginaries (Anderson, 2012). As rewilding and wetland restoration projects expand across the UK, these mythic and symbolic relationships with water are increasingly relevant for public health, environmental adaptation, and community wellbeing.
Historically, Britain’s coastal and estuarine waters were framed through rich “hydro-mythologies,” including saints’ wells, selkie stories, and healing waters (Larrington, 2015). These traditions once shaped practices of care, belonging, and ecological imagination, yet they are rarely reflected in contemporary environmental policy or wellbeing discourse. This project investigates how such older cultural narratives coexist with or re-emerge alongside modern environmental concerns, and how water-based experiences support emotional resilience and imaginative connection to place.
The candidate will explore these themes using ethnography and creative practice. They will conduct fieldwork in at least one coastal landscape, drawing on approaches such as ethnographic sensory observation, and participatory storytelling. They will document how people experience coastal water bodies, how they draw on mythic or symbolic understandings, and how these narratives shape responses to ecological change and personal or community wellbeing. The student will also have the opportunity to produce creative outputs, integrating arts-based methods with qualitative research.
Aims
- Explore sensory, emotional, and embodied experiences of coastal water in rewilded or restored landscapes.
- Examine how mythic, spiritual, and folkloric narratives influence contemporary engagement with water, rewilding, and ecological care.
- Support the co-production of creative and practical outputs that foreground cultural and emotional dimensions of living well with water.
Training and Collaboration
The student will receive comprehensive training in qualitative and creative research methods, including ethnography, arts-based inquiry, and participatory facilitation. They will have access to postgraduate methods training, interdisciplinary reading groups, and workshops on research design, data analysis, and creative dissemination. Where appropriate, the student may collaborate with local organisations, heritage groups, or community partners to co-produce outputs and public engagement materials. These collaborations will support skills in partnership building, applied research, and community-facing scholarship.
Project Structure
Year 1:
Training in qualitative and creative methodologies, literature review, site selection, ethics approval, and pilot fieldwork in a chosen coastal location.
Year 2:
Main fieldwork including ethnographic observation, interviews, participatory storytelling workshops, and archival or documentary research on coastal mythic traditions. Begin preliminary analysis.
Year 3:
Detailed data analysis, development of creative outputs, writing of thesis chapters, and dissemination through conferences or community events.
This project is offered as part of The AHRC-NERC Living Well with Water [LWwW] Doctoral Focal Award at the University’s of Hull and Liverpool, in partnership with National Trust, Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and Tate Liverpool. By applying for one of our fully funded interdisciplinary doctoral awards you will explore the relationship between water, culture and community in coastal regions and become part of a new generation of researchers shaping solutions to urgent human and planetary health challenges.
You will participate in our innovative doctoral training programme, undertake a placement with one of our partner organisations, and learn research skills transferable to a variety of future careers. https://www.hull.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-research/funded-opportunities/living-well-with-water
Further reading
Anderson, J. (2012) ‘Relational Places: The Surfed Wave as Assemblage and Convergence’, Environment and planning. D, Society & space, 30(4), pp. 570–587. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1068/d17910.
Britton, E., Kindermann, G., Domegan, C., & Carlin, C. (2020). Blue care: a systematic review of blue space interventions for health and wellbeing. Health promotion international, 35(1), 50–69. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/day103
Larrington, C. (2015). The land of the green man : A journey through the supernatural landscapes of the British Isles. I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited.
White, M. P., Elliott, L. R., Gascon, M., Roberts, B., & Fleming, L. E. (2020). Blue space, health and well-being: A narrative overview and synthesis of potential benefits. Environmental Research, 191, 110169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2020.110169