AIMING FOR A SEA CHANGE

Understanding and appreciating the importance of our oceans is key to safeguarding their – and our – future. Ocean literacy sits at the heart of this.

Testing The Waters

Diving into ocean-themed narratives on social media was at the heart of a multidisciplinary pilot study in 2022.

The project, which came about following a University-wide sandpit on Narrative and Storytelling, involved social media mining to identify narratives that are not present or are muffled on social media.

The project team included Professor Susan Gourvenec (Engineering), Dr Stephanie Jones (English), Dr Bindi Shah (Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology), Dr Dina Lupin (Law), and Professor Les Carr (Electronics and Computer Science).

Stephanie outlined: “The discussions we found through the digital mining and scraping work are those we expected –the ocean as an economic zone, a war zone, a leisure zone and as a visual aesthetic are at the surface, and the ocean as an ecology, a scene of inequality, a multisensory experience, and a site of protest are submerged. But it’s perhaps even starker and less edifying than we thought it would be.”

The team compared two community projects – testimonies about the role of the ocean from Kerala in India, and from South Africa. “These projects brought emotion and attachment to the ocean – in terms of economic livelihood, heritage and religion – into focus,” said Stephanie.

The study will inform social media search terms for future work, added Stephanie: “This project deliberately worked with broad terms to yield a snapshot. In critical combination with the reports on the community projects, this will allow us to select and combine a more subtle range and scale of search terms in future work.”

‘Ocean literacy’ is defined as the understanding of our individual and collective impact and influence on the ocean, and the ocean’s impact and influence on us.

Here, we outline three current research projects at Southampton that are engaging directly with ocean literacy – and seeking to improve it.

Creative writing

Southampton researchers are working with creative writing facilitators ArtfulScribe to address waste along the south coast of England.

The pilot project is being conducted by Dr Stephanie Jones, Associate Professor in English and a Director of the Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities (SIAH), and Dr Katie Holdway, Research Fellow at SIAH.

Stephanie outlined: “The Creative Writing Against Coastal Waste project is working with ArtfulScribe to design and deliver creative writing in the community projects. The focus is coastal waste, which, in our region, is a massive issue.

“The project started after we saw images postlockdown of staggering amounts of waste on our beaches, and heard that local councils are struggling to fund beach cleaning. This is about using creative methods to try to influence behaviour change and inform policy.”

The project’s ultimate aim is to create a toolkit to support local creative practitioners in developing events that engage the public with coastal sustainability and ocean literacy.

Katie said: “The project is giving local creatives access to cutting-edge resources about ocean literacy and coastal waste management, including podcasts, blog posts and carefully curated interviews with experts in the field.”

Matt West, Director of ArtfulScribe, added: “Processing challenges associated with climate change is a collective responsibility – we need to do what we can to cultivate an environment in which positive change is possible. As a writer development agency, it’s incumbent upon us to use our skills and knowledge of language to help communicate, raise awareness of, and encourage behaviour change towards the prospect of a brighter future for all species.”

Changing behaviour

A separate ocean literacy project is looking to shift people’s perception of the ocean via policy.

Dr Wassim Dbouk, Marine and Maritime Policy Research Fellow, is seeking to produce evidence to demonstrate the need for future policies and guidelines to focus on changing people’s perception of the ocean, from thinking of it as a separate entity, to seeing it as something they are intrinsically linked to.

Wassim said: “I started thinking about it when I came across a Parliamentary report on behaviour change, which was critical of the approach adopted thus far to achieve behaviour change for climate action.

“This shift in perception would lead people to adopt healthier behaviours around the ocean since they would equate it with adopting healthier behaviours towards themselves.”

The project is running throughout 2023, funded by Public Policy Southampton’s New Things Fund, a programme created to provide the impetus to start a journey towards policy engagement.

Public perceptions

Boosting ocean literacy – especially in relation to the deep sea – via film and art is the focal point of PhD student Fiona Middleton’s current work.

Fiona, a student on the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute’s Intelligent Oceans Leverhulme Doctoral Programme, is working with Brighton-based artist and filmmaker Emma Critchley. Emma is currently researching her next film on deep-sea mining.

Fiona said: “Emma and I are holding two events to explore public perceptions of the deep sea, and people’s experiences and feelings about it – as well as how different modes of literacy and art mediate those perceptions. We are looking to experiment with what ‘deep ocean literacy’ might be.”

The events will feature Emma’s last film about deep-sea mining, Common Heritage, as well as a panel talk followed by open discussion and a creative workshop where participants will have the opportunity to handle specimens from the deep seabed. The workshops will take place on Saturday 29 April 2023 at the Quay Arts Centre, Newport, Isle of Wight, and on Saturday 13 May 2023 at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton.

For more information www.quayarts.org www.jhg.art/whats-on