Introducing Liminal Waterway Countercultures

We live in a time of multiple, interconnected crises. Regional wars are spiralling into global ones; unprecedented climate change, pollution and mass species extinction degrade the possibility of a liveable life for humans and non-human beings. Democratic institutions and liberal norms hang in the balance, subject to toxic culture wars. The late Anthropocene’s turbulence—including climate change and resource wars in the global South—uproots a growing percentage of the world’s population, shaping unprecedented mobility and connection, leading to real demographic diversification, which has been imagined in Europe as a catastrophe, as a clash of civilisations or a deluge of refugees. Amplified by populist entrepreneurs of panic, diversification has been followed by a severe backlash, with defensive identity politics becoming ever more entrenched. This backlash has driven the intense violence of border regimes, with martial law declared on the US border in 2025 and an undeclared war on maritime migration leading to 29,000 deaths in the Mediterranean Sea in the last decade.

Material solutions are urgently needed to these crises, but scholars, activists and cultural practitioners also have a duty to intervene in how our societies understand or fail to understand the causes and consequences of these crises: in how we imagine and narrate our condition. As Michaela Fenske notes, “Times of crises are times of narrating. Crises not only ask for narrating as a means of coping with uncertainty and danger, it also constitutes a fundamental resource of survival within crises”. Our project therefore proposes that Europe’s peripheries, and specifically its liminal waterways, are sites where countercultures emerge which provide models of something like resilience - weathering the crisis - and resources for imagining a way out and a world beyond, offering both material solutions but also new narratives for hope.

Our cases – some historical and some contemporary – are located in the Atlantic estuaries of the Ria Formosa and Merseyside, the Channel ports London and Ostend, the Mediterranean coasts of Marseille and the Balkans, the riverine network linking central Europe to the Adriatic, and the urban streams of Athens: waterways, many of them post-imperial, that mark Europe’s peripheries or limits, that constitute edges or boundaries and therefore enable interesting things to happen. We call these liminal waterway countercultures: creative alternative forms of entangled human and non-human life that have emerged in these spaces. We retrieve submerged narratives of how water – imaginatively or literally – has helped communities, artists, activists and municipalities to re-appropriate urban and natural space. The waterway countercultures we explore are varied: from the informal housing of migrants to Marseille, struggling to eke a living in the outskirts of the city, to the queer and multiracial micro-communities of the London docklands in the industrial age.

Across our sites we are developing four main themes. The first is about dwelling with water or at the water’s edge. In this theme, we explore how humans and non-humans have made, inhabited and re-imagined waterscapes: islands, ports, shantytowns and estuaries as social, cultural and ecological sites where people have found a living but also found ways of visualising, narrating and celebrating that living, despite the fragility of these waterscapes in the context of flooding, drying, overtourism, de-industrialisation, soil sealing, land use pressure and other challenges. For example, how have how have multilingual writers on what is now the Croatian coast produced literary representations of karst landscapes, radical ecocriticism and regional nature writing? How have Marseille’s urban spaces of musical production, reception, and sociability – cabarets, cafés, concert halls, and recording studios – been sites for imagining places and identities that stretch across the sea?

The second is about connecting across water, exploring how liminal waterway sites are linked to multiple elsewhere by the flows of rivers and seas. We tell stories of flows of people and of goods and capital, migrations of species, the home-making and departures of immigrants and emigrants; stories of voyages and itineraries, often shaped by imperialism’s liquid circuitry. For example, what happened when Habsburg sea access moved from the Flemish coast to the Adriatic, and the Imperial Asiatic Company of Trieste and Antwerp’s China tea trade re-located in Fiume?

The third theme is around economies of water, exploring the work done on the water and at its edge: the labour of the global maritime proletariat, of fisherfolk and shellpickers, as well in the tourist industry – work that can be dirty and pollutant, sometimes extractive, alive with affective resonance, often involving intangible skills that are under threat with the passing generations. For example, what happens when an island community shifts from artisanal fishing and bivalve harvesting to oyster farming—an industry increasingly tied to global consumption demands?

And the fourth is about the struggle for the right to water and the rights of water: liquid insurgencies, from dockworker strikes to battles about sewage, from resistance to tourism to sailors’ mutinies. These forms of activism have travelled across our sites, and generated theories of change and hope, including old and new forms of ecocriticism. For example, what does it mean to think of the urban waterways of Athens or Marseille or the riverine system of the Balkans as bearers of rights?

We use historical, literary, philological, spatial, visual, botanical, and ethnographic methods, as well as artistic interventions, to explore these multilingual sites of cultural production and conviviality. We attend to stories, poems, periodicals, vinyl records, and photographs coming out of our sites, but also to the urban streams, the water pipes, the oysters, the limestone karst. For example, in Culatra we are producing an ethnographic film, in Liverpool we are working with residents on a PhotoVoice project, while in Austria we investigate how prose, travelogues, folk tales, poetry, and film relate to ecological, economic and political crises through the motif and trope of rivers.

Our team includes the universities of Aix-Marseille, Birkbeck, Graz, Southampton and Zagreb, as well as CRIA, the Centre for Research in Anthropology in Lisbon. Working with our Associate Partners – Sciaena (a Portuguese grassroots environmental NGO), Marseille’s Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (Mucem), and the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral (PPMHP) in Rijeka – our project is working on two main outputs. The first is an interactive digital map to enable residents, visitors and others to virtually or physically walk through our sites and follow the thematic and literal journeys between them, which should be online by the start of 2027. The second is a museum exhibition, to be held in Rijeka in 2027, that will visually narrate stories of endurance and resistance around struggles for the right to and the rights of waterways. 

It is our hope that these outputs will map and retrieve submerged stories of living otherwise with difference and weathering crisis, contributing to a new imagining of our world.

 

Author: Ben Gidley

Date: 16.2.2026