Research Spotlight: Ocean Narratives Workshop Event

Last week, the Creative Writing Against Coastal Waste project team participated in the Ocean Narratives Workshop: an interdisciplinary event arising from the first phase of the Ocean Narratives Project, based at the University of Southampton. Ocean Narratives is a pilot research initiative launched by Susan Gourvenec, Stephanie Jones, Bindi Shah, Dina Lupin and Les Carr, following a recent institution-wide Sandpit on Narrative and Storytelling. The project is supported by the Higher Education Innovation Fund, the Web Science Institute, the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute, and the Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities, with seed funding from the Sandpit enabling global collaborations with Jacqui Ayling, (University of Southampton), Buhle Francis (Rhodes University) and Jiswin Joseph (Central Institute of Fisheries Technology, Kerala, India).

This initial, exploratory phase of the project has three key aims: first, to investigate public narratives and stories about the ocean; second, to explore how those narratives and stories shape policy and activism; and third, to examine what is at stake when individuals or groups are excluded from them. The study centres on two different kinds of public narrative: digital media narrative and community narrative. Community narratives were collected via community case studies focussed on two fishing towns in South Africa and Kerala, India. Digital media data was mined from a range of platforms, including Twitter, Amazon, and the BBC Archives.

The day of workshops opened with three vibrant presentations about each thread of the project. Due to ongoing ethical protections, we are only able to talk about these presentations holistically in this blog post. Nonetheless, we would like to use the broader questions raised by the event as a springboard in order to reflect on the kinds of ocean narratives our own project is working with, shaping, and perpetuating.

In the first presentation, Bindi discussed her work gathering narrative testimonies about the role played by the ocean in shaping local lives and experiences in Kerala’s fishing communities. The choice of Kerala was particularly topical, as it is a coastal region of India prone to extreme climate events. Using the testimonies gathered from her work, Bindi posed two broader questions that resonated throughout the day’s discussions: first, what do we mean by narrative? And second, what kinds of ethical, behavioural and attitudinal changes are needed to produce decolonised knowledge? This second question is particularly relevant to ongoing institution-wide decolonisation agendas, but also encouraged us as participants to think carefully about the importance of remaining alert to who is speaking, and who is listening to, recording or publishing a given ocean narrative, and the impact that this might have on on its shape, perceived veracity and wider circulation.

Bindi’s presentation was logically followed by Buhle and Dina’s account of the South African community case study, which similarly examined the ways in which fishing communities characterise and relate to the oceans. In addition to discussing some of the results of their interviews, Buhle explained her work with the One Ocean Hub, including a piece of theatre entitled lalela uLwandle (‘Listen to the Sea’ in isiZulu). This performance found novel methods of communicating ocean narratives to its audiences via actors of three different ethnicities – methods that One Ocean Hub compares to the act of pressing your ear to a seashell to hear the whispered stories of the sea. [1] Interestingly, as Buhle highlighted, the company producing lalela uLwandle is known as ‘Empatheatre’, which highlighted the importance of intermingling empathy with performance art in order to ‘gather diverse testimonies’.

In the final presentation, Jacqui talked about her survey-style work mining and scraping a range of social and news media platforms to analyse ways that the ocean is spoken about on the internet. Centred at the University of Southampton, this thread of the research was undertaken from an Anglocentric perspective. Using broad key terms alongside Boolean operators, Jacqui’s presentation highlighted the potential for further research into the interrelatedness of the ocean, digital media and cultural communities, and explained the role played by different digital tools in producing different data visualisations. Given that this was an interdisciplinary event made lively by its participants’ very different knowledge bases, this sharing of method was a particularly useful addition to the presentation and stimulated some interesting discussion during the remainder of the day about the benefits, trials and tribulations of interdisciplinary collaboration.

The presentations were followed by an afternoon of breakout groups and discussion. Therefore, while we are only able to discuss the project data itself in general terms, we would like to use the final part of this blog to think about the broader questions that arose from the data and how they might inform our own practice as we finalise the resources for our training sessions with creative facilitators, which are due to take place later in the Autumn. The discussions crystalised around three key questions, which were heartily debated during the afternoon:

What (and who) do we mean when we talk about narrative?
What is the difference between a narrative and a testimony?
How do we continue to bridge the differences in disciplinary approaches and methodologies in projects relating to the oceans?

The first question has a clear applicability to the two community case studies in the context of decolonisation agendas, where contrapuntal reading and the question of whose narrative is being told by whom is of central importance. However, it is also worth bearing in mind in relation to Jacqui’s work with data. The question-and-answer session that followed Jacqui’s presentation, gave rise to a number of ‘what if?’ style questions. What if these searches were not conducted from an Anglocentric vantage point? What if different key terms were used? What if we included or excluded different sources in the keyword searches? What came through in these discussions was the importance of clearly parametrising webscraping and data collection activities.

It was also interesting that both community case studies dealt with the idea of ‘testimony’. For Bindi and Buhle, the narratives collected from their respective communities pulled away from more relaxed ideas of ‘storytelling’ and took on importance because of their claims to verifying core truths about human-ocean relations, or their ability to be used as evidence. It was particularly notable that, when discussing the South African case study, Buhle talked about the idea of ‘testimony’ alongside the idea of ‘empathy’, with testimonial evidence gaining weight because of its ability to generate an empathetic response. This connection between testimony and empathy is one we might discuss with the creative practitioners we are working with, perhaps following up which approach is favoured by participants in their workshops and why.

Finally, as the day drew to a close, the conversation turned to ocean narratives as a vehicle for interdisciplinary work. This part of the discussion focussed on the difficulty of formal experimentation in academic publications, which, in the absence of opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and shared methods, can sometimes restrict the kinds of narratives we are able to tell or analyse.

When we begin our new interview series on the blog in a few weeks’ time, we will build upon these initial conversations about interdisciplinary work by asking south coast project teams specific questions about their research methods. Our hope is that by creating a space for these teams to share what has and has not worked for them will provide inspiration for future interdisciplinary collaborations as well as for our own creative facilitators as they prepare their workshops on ocean literacy and coastal waste for a range of public participants.

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Research Spotlight: Ocean Narratives Workshop Event