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.

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