While most academics approach Europe from the perspective of the continent’s landmass, we explore the waterways that marks its peripheries or limits, especially its “liminal” waterways – those that mark edges or boundaries and therefore enable interesting things to happen. We focus on what we call liminal waterway countercultures, the creative alternative forms of life that have emerged in these spaces. Against the backdrop of Europe’s crisis of diversification (the ways in which cultural diversity and human mobility have appeared in narratives of panic across the continent) and of its ecological crisis (as rivers and coastlines dry up, erode and flood), countercultures emerge which provide models of resilience. We retrieve submerged narratives of how water – imaginatively or literally – has been central to how communities, artists, activists and municipalities have re-appropriated post-colonial, post-fascist and post-socialist urban and natural space. We use historical, literary, spatial and anthropological methods to explore these multilingual sites of cultural production and conviviality, through which tides of people, ideas and objects flow. Our cases – some historical and some contemporary – are located in the Atlantic estuaries the Ria Formosa and Merseyside, the Channel ports London and Ostend, the island of Rhodes, the Mediterranean coasts of Marseille and the Balkans, and the riverine network linking central Europe to the Adriatic. Working with our Associate Partners – Sciaena (a Portuguese grassroots environmental NGO), the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (Mucem), and the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral in Rijeka (PPMHP) – our project will produce digital audio-visual material on each site (including virtual “walks” through each as well as cartographic resources enabling non-academic users in and beyond our sites to visualise them and flows between them), and culminate in a museum exhibition at PPMHP, creating future cultural knowledge resilience in frontline nodes of climate crisis and migrational shift.

KEYWORDS:

liminality waterways, countercultures, blue humanities, environmental humanities, digital humanities.