Waves of Memory and Change : Sensory Co-dwelling on Latvia’s Eroding Seascape

Sammanfattning

This study investigates how residents of the Jūrkalne parish live with a dramatically changing seascape, in which various environmental phenomena, including coastal erosion, climate change, and everyday mutability, converge with issues such as a planned offshore wind park amid uncertainty. At the heart of this research is the relationality between sea and land, presented as a shifting co-dwelling that prompts diverse sensory experiences and affective encounters, and that turns our eyes to ghostly absence. Based on 10 weeks of fieldwork in Jūrkalne parish – including participant observation, walking interviews, and the collection of audiovisual material – the study pursues a multimodal approach, reflected not only in the research process but also in the written thesis through the inclusion of photos and sounds of the seascape via QR codes. The empirical chapters highlight the paradoxes and complexities interwoven into the thesis by examining (1) the seascape as a mutable sensory co-dwelling that is learned, provides, and can be life-giving, (2) the seascape as a dramatically changing dwelling that is navigated, takes, and can be life-threatening, and (3) how a drastically changing seascape is lived with, managed, and contested. By addressing the coastal environment as a seascape, the thesis takes a step toward further bridging the nature-culture divide characteristic of earlier seascape scholarship, illuminating the seascape of Jūrkalne as encoded with meaning-making. Moreover, the study addresses an ethnographic gap in research on Latvian seascapes, especially regarding their changing, affective, sensory, and memory dimensions.