Conversing Along our Coastline Part 2: Cultural Communities, Marine Values

In our post last week, we spoke about the first of three panels that made up our recent lightning talks event: ‘Conversing Along our Coastline’. The panel comprised two Exeter-based projects: ‘Climate Stories’ and ‘One Chance Left’. In the conversation that followed, we discussed the difficulty of balancing two different ways of using narrative in climate-based public engagement initiatives: the first being the use of narrative as a warning, and the second as a vehicle for hope. Both these approaches can inspire behaviour change, but equally both can create the conditions for inaction or denial. Both Climate Stories and One Chance Left offered interesting case studies into how we might balance warning and hope through the careful use of creative methods in a community setting.

In today’s post, we are going to connect these ideas of hope and warning with the projects presented on the second panel of our event: ‘Cultural Communities, Marine Values’. Whereas our first panel focussed on the ways in which creative methods can inspire different responses among different cultural communities, this panel explored the values and objectives that drive those responses.

Our first speaker, Stephanie Northen, kicked off the panel with a discussion of Revolution Plastics. Revolution Plastics is an interdisciplinary project based at the University of Portsmouth which aims to reduce plastic waste and its negative impacts across the country and even the world. In addition to collaborations across the global south, the project team have recently launched the Global Plastics Policy Centre which aims to provide key groups in government and industry with research-based evidence to support them in taking action against plastic pollution.

This presentation was followed by Roy Hanney’s discussion of his multimedia arts project, ‘Octopus Story’. At the heart of this project is the story of an octopus who sends a watery delegation to humans to implore them to change their behaviour. The story encourages its audiences to recognise that, despite appearances, it is often humans that are the monsters, rather than the octopus. The story was disseminated via workshops for young people, and collaborations with sound artists to create an immersive experience at Portsmouth Cathedral, where the public could learn eight key lessons about marine health from the octopus.

Octopus Story and Revolution Plastics are connected by academic networks and their Portsmouth geography, as well as an implicit focus on marine values. For Revolution Plastics, marine values guide the Global Plastics Policy Centre as it assembles evidence to advance meaningful environmental policy. On the other hand, for Octopus Story, marine values are established and communicated via the octopus’s eight lessons and—as Roy himself noted in his presentation—through the blending of fiction with real moral concerns about the marine environment.

The introduction of these two very different ways of implementing marine values in cultural and policy settings, segued neatly into Victoria Leslie’s detailed research-led presentation about the Diverse Marine Values Project, a collaboration between the Universities of Portsmouth, Highlands and Islands, Greenwich, Cardiff, and Liverpool. The aim of this project is to think critically about marine values on a more conceptual level. Most notably, Victoria discussed her extensive work on definitions, thoughtfully interrogating what we mean when we talk about ‘values’, with a particular emphasis on the elusive concept of ‘cultural values’. Ultimately, Victoria concluded, values can be interdisciplinary, but they can also be exclusionary if we don’t attend carefully to which cultural groups they might prioritise or leave out.

The final paper for this panel moved us to the Island of Portland, where Sandy Kirkby shared a range of recent arts projects that have been organised by the Portland-based arts organisation b-side. After introducing us to b-side’s most famous project, the Pollution Pods, and a fascinating art installation made of Portland stone painted with a pollutive substance that gradually faded in the island’s clean air, Sandy talked about a series of sculptures relating to climate change that have been installed along the south coast. As Sandy explained, one porthole-shaped installation enabled visitors to imagine the implications of sea-level rises and proved particularly popular on social media, as visitors to the site took selfies. This installation is a prime example of how leisure can translate to learning, and how certain cultural outputs can automatically facilitate their own evaluation mechanisms, since when the public share their thoughts on social media, those thoughts can themselves be analysed as evidence of the project’s effectiveness. We will discuss the interrelatedness of outputs and evaluation methods in our next post.

Sandy’s discussion of the porthole installation looped our conversations back to the distinction between narratives of warning and narratives of hope, as she described the eagerness with which members of the public took photos next to the porthole sculpture, while at the same time it was inscribed with the message:

The levels are changing and so must we.

Having considered the implications of messages of warning and hope in panel one, and built upon these themes by thinking about cultural communities and marine values in panel two, the stage was set in the third panel to turn to narrative and storytelling itself. In next week’s post, we will reflect upon this panel to take a closer look at the relationship between storytelling and often elusive concept of ‘ocean literacy’.

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Conversing Along our Coastline Part 2: Cultural Communities, Marine Values