Sustainable Development

Future archaeologies of marine litter

Although there is growing public awareness of the problem of marine litter, the emphasis is often on either the accumulation of waste in distant, exotic locations (such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch) or on litter left on beaches by visitors, to be cleaned up once a year in the Great British Beach Clean. For the people living in areas such as the Galloway, Argyll and Bute coasts, the Small and Western Isles, the Inner and Outer Hebrides, the Orkneys and Shetland, marine litter is neither a distant problem nor one that can be cleaned up once a year in September.

Working in partnership with the Scottish Islands Federation Marine Litter Working Group (SIF-MLWG), Solway Firth Partnership (SFP) and Museums of the FutureNow, the project will combine citizen science with arts and archaeology to create a means of exploring, documenting and communicating the varied impacts of marine litter in western Scotland.

Building on initial work currently underway in the Solway Firth, where the team are creating a Solway Hoard (modelled on the famous Galloway Hoard), they will work with local beach rangers, beach-cleaning groups and members of communities as co-researchers in up to four sites, selected by the SIF-MLWG. Initial fieldwork will include participatory observation of beach-cleans in early 2023, following the winter storm season. They will work with our co-researchers to select approximately 6 items from each site to use as the basis for an exhibition in a museum in an imagined future. Museums of the FutureNow is an evolving series of speculative artworks and participatory workshops designed to explore the web of ecological, cultural, technological and political factors that combine to create complex challenges for society and environment both now and in the future. The Waste Stories project (led by Wilson) uses participatory fiction to help people think differently about waste. Together, they will use the objects selected by their co-researchers as prompts in co-creation workshops where community-members will generate stories, scenarios and explanatory texts that will accompany each object in the museum. They will combine this with beach litter data, videos and photographs to create physical museum installations in the local sites and a virtual museum that will be open to all.

This project is funded by through an internal University of Glasgow NERC Interdisciplinarity Call with funding of £19,967.

CR&DALL Theme Tags:

Sustainable Development

Water and Fire: Enhancing capacity and reducing risk through 15 'Best Bets' for transformative adaptation with vulnerable residents on the Cape Flats

Two interconnected, mutually exacerbating global trends are putting an ever-increasing number of people at risk of environmental hazards or disasters: the climate crisis and increasing urbanization. Climate impacts are already being felt by the millions of people living in informal and marginalized urban settlements, in the form of run-away fires, water scarcity and floods. These settlements, often comprising temporary dwellings and located on the fringes of the world’s major cities, within sight of the infrastructure and services they lack, may be particularly physically vulnerable to climate-related shocks and stresses. However, they are also sites of immense strength and ingenuity. There is much to be learned from them, both about how residents cope and adapt and how we might envisage changes in the future in other parts of the world.

The Water and Fire project funded through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) by the ESRC prioritises the voices and lived experiences of residents of three marginalised settlements in the Cape Flats region of South Africa. Between 2019 and 2022, the core team worked with community co-researchers and other residents in three areas of the Cape Flats that are already experiencing the impacts of global climate change on a daily basis: Delft (focusing on water scarcity), Overcome Heights (focusing on frequent fires) and Sweet Home Farm (focusing on recurrent flooding). Using a variety of creative methods, our co-researchers developed rich descriptions of their experiences of and responses to these hazards. These descriptions were then used to develop community-driven recommendations for resilience actions.

The project started in November 2019 and will end in March 2023. In the final phase of the project, we are combining these findings with engagement activities in the UK to create a context-sensitive framework for the development of community-driven responses to climate change. Its intial funding through GCRF was £899,545 and extension funding through GNCA (Stirling) was £25,798

The Co-I within CR&DALL is Dr Anna Wilson

PI: Derek McGhee, University of Stirling, Co-Is Gill Black and Leif Petersen, Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation, RSA, Jen Dickie and Niall Hamilton, University of Stirling, Kirsty Carden and Guy Lamb, University of Cape Town, RSA, Laurence Piper, University of Western Cape, RSA