• Skip to content
  • Skip to footer
  • Accessibility options
University of Brighton
  • About us
  • Business and
    employers
  • Alumni and
    supporters
  • For
    students
  • For
    staff
  • Accessibility
    options
Open menu
Home
Home
  • Close
  • Study here
    • Courses and subjects
    • Find a course
    • A-Z course list
    • Explore our subjects
    • Academic departments
    • Visiting the university
    • Explore: get to know us
    • Upcoming events
    • Virtual tours
    • Chat to our students and staff
    • Open days
    • Applicant days
    • Order a prospectus
    • Ask a question
    • Studying here
    • Accommodation and locations
    • Applying
    • Undergraduate
    • Postgraduate
    • Transferring from another university
    • The Student Contract
    • Clearing
    • International students
    • Fees and finance
    • Advice and help
    • Advice for students
    • Advice for parents and carers
    • Advice for schools and teachers
    • Managing your application
    • Undergraduate
    • Postgraduate
    • Apprenticeships
  • Research
    • Research and knowledge exchange
    • Research and knowledge exchange organisation
    • The Global Challenges
    • Centres of Research Excellence (COREs)
    • Research Excellence Groups (REGs)
    • Our research database
    • Information for business
    • Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP)
    • Postgraduate research degrees
    • PhD research disciplines and programmes
    • PhD funding opportunities and studentships
    • How to apply for your PhD
    • Research environment
    • Investing in research careers
    • Strategic plan
    • Research concordat
    • News, events, publications and films
    • Featured research and knowledge exchange projects
    • Research and knowledge exchange news
    • Inaugural lectures
    • Research and knowledge exchange publications and films
    • Academic staff search
  • About us
  • Business and employers
  • Alumni, supporters and giving
  • Current students
  • Staff
  • Accessibility
Search our site
Baboshka-banner
Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics
  • What we do
  • Join us for study, work or visit
  • Who we are
  • What we do
    • What we do
    • Research and enterprise projects
  • Research and enterprise projects
    • Research and enterprise projects
    • Protest camps and climate activism
    • Cityscapes of Violence in Karachi
    • Migrant Journeymen from Afghanistan: Taxis, Life and Making Tracks in Britain
    • Mental Disorder: Anthropological Insights
    • On Kandahar Street: Afghan migration to Singapore and the British Straits Settlements in the mid to late nineteenth century
    • Outer space as environment
    • Peasant Resistance, Food Sovereignty, and Human Rights
    • Homer in the laboratory
    • cli-MATES
    • Growing Heritage: The politics of heritage vegetables
    • Evaluation cultures in the political risk industry
    • FutureCoast Youth
    • IKETIS The mediation of climate change induced migration
    • Indebted-entanglements
    • The Isimila stone age project
    • Babochka
    • Ecological crisis, sustainability and the psychosocial subject
    • YOUR world research - Insecurity and uncertainty
    • The People's Pier
    • Emergent Authorities
    • Formulating implicity: contemporary feminist activism and critique in a neoliberal context
    • Here today: moving images of climate change
    • Mediating climate change
    • Power in outer space
    • Problems of participation
    • Landscapes of authority, affect and public memory
    • Race, Place and the Seaside: Postcards from the Edge
    • social-ecological resilience of a waterside community in changing water conditions
    • The happiness project
  • Race, Place and the Seaside: Postcards from the Edge

Race, Place and the Seaside: Postcards from the Edge

This project explores issues of race, ethnicity, whiteness and multiculture at the English seaside. It seeks to explain shifting ethno-racial demographics, migratory politics and spatial dynamics at the edge of the sea, along with the relative im/mobilities of the minority ethnic communities who move and reside there.

The seaside is conceptualised both as a locus of racialised categorisation, exclusion and subjugation, and one of resistance, conviviality and intercultural exchange. Combining theoretical insight and empirical fieldwork, the project disrupts dominant thinking that fixes ontologically minority ethnic bodies to urban spaces, and overcomes their erasure and silencing from the seaside landscapes of the popular imagination.

 

Merry-go-round-on-seafront

Project timeframes

The project began in 2007 and is currently ongoing.

 

Project aims

The project aims

  • to demonstrate the racialised nature of seaside environments – an aspect of England’s coastal past and present that has been habitually ignored in popular and academic discourses.
  • to argue for the inclusion of the distinctive spaces, places, traditions and narratives of the seaside and coast within broader analyses of race in contemporary Britain.

Project findings and impact

This project has provided a range of theoretical interventions regarding our understanding of race, racialisation and racism at the seaside. It has provided a large base of empirical data that demonstrates how cultures of racial exclusion operate alongside those of convivial multiculture in coastal environments. This project challenges many existing social and cultural orthodoxies about seaside landscapes by foregrounding the experiences of minority ethnic communities who live, work and play next to the sea.

In 2011 Daniel Burdsey was interviewed about this work on BBC Radio 4’s flagship social science programme, Thinking Allowed.  

Research team

Dr Daniel Burdsey

 

Output

Burdsey, D. (2011) ‘Strangers on the shore? Racialised representation, identity and in/visibilities of whiteness at the English seaside’, Cultural Sociology, 5, 4: 537-52.

Burdsey, D. (2013) ‘ “The foreignness is still quite visible in this town”: multiculture, marginality and prejudice at the English seaside’, Patterns of Prejudice, 47, 2: 95-116.

Gilchrist, P., Carter, T. & Burdsey, D. (eds.) (2014) Coastal Cultures: Liminality and Leisure Eastbourne: Leisure Studies Association.

Burdsey, D. (2016) Race, Place and the Seaside: Postcards from the Edge Basingstoke: Palgrave.

 

Partners

Back to top
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • TikTok
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn icon

Contact us

University of Brighton
Mithras House
Lewes Road
Brighton
BN2 4AT

Main switchboard 01273 600900

Course enquiries

Sign up for updates

University contacts

Report a problem with this page

Quick links Quick links

  • Courses
  • Open days
  • Order a prospectus
  • Academic departments
  • Academic staff
  • Professional services departments
  • Jobs
  • Privacy and cookie policy
  • Accessibility statement
  • Libraries
  • Term dates
  • Maps
  • Graduation
  • Site information
  • Online shop
  • COVID-19

Information for Information for

  • Current students
  • International students
  • Media/press
  • Careers advisers/teachers
  • Parents/carers
  • Business/employers
  • Alumni/supporters
  • Suppliers
  • Local residents