Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures
Exploring humanity’s relationships with water in the ‘green-blue’ regions of the world, past, present and future.
Overview
Living on the edge
More than 30% of the global population live within 100km of the sea, and estuaries and coastlines are home to many of the world’s largest cities.
These are, and have always been, precarious as well as populous places, and coastal, estuarine and delta communities have long been shaped by both the opportunities and challenges of living ‘on the edge’.
Learning to live with water
Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of floods and droughts, putting coastal and delta communities at growing risk. To adapt, societies must build resilience at every level and learn to ‘live with water’. The challenge is urgent – those most vulnerable are often least informed.
Studying humanity’s relationship with water in ‘green-blue’ zones calls for insights from history, diverse disciplines, and Indigenous and non-Western cultures. Learning from these perspectives helps reshape our environmental interactions and supports sustainable futures. To protect communities and cultures in high-risk regions, we must change how we live with and respond to water.
The Approach
Shaping the Future of Water Research Through the Green-Blue Humanities
The University of Hull Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures pioneers a new, humanities-led, interdisciplinary and transhistorical research area, the ‘green-blue humanities’.
It equips a new generation of PhD students to take this agenda forward, transforming our understanding of our relationships with water and shaping future research agendas, methods, and approaches within and between disciplines.
Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Centre for Water Cultures Conference 2025
3 mins
To develop a highly original and significant new interdisciplinary research area – the green-blue humanities – that will interrogate cultural responses to, and understandings of, water in coastal, estuarine and delta regions globally.
To equip a new generation of researchers to take the green-blue humanities forward in future, adopting interdisciplinary perspectives on aspects of water cultures in ways that will shape the research agendas, theories, methods, and approaches of their own disciplines.
To bring innovative arts and humanities approaches to bear on the challenge of engaging diverse communities in building personal, local, national and global resilience to water stresses and shocks, today and for the future.
Research strands
Exploring water cultures: past, present and future perspectives
Living With/out Water
Living With/out Water adopts interdisciplinary approaches to exploring how Western, non-Western and Indigenous communities have experienced, managed, and learned to live with and without water in risky green-blue environments from the earliest peoples to today’s coastal communities. This strand of our work focuses on the material and political implications of living with/out water, exploring how water has been governed and managed, gendered and racialised, and examining histories of risk and resilience in comparative perspective.
Imagining Water
Imagining Water examines the belief systems, folklores, and fictions that have arisen alongside, and in response to, experiences of living with water in coastal, estuarine, and delta communities, exploring water as a source of creativity that helps shape the identity of these water cultures worldwide, and throughout history. Embracing a range of media – from poetry to policy documents, film to music, Indigenous myths to video games – our research asks what these representations tell us about community and creative responses to living with water and the challenges and opportunities this involves.
Building Water Futures
Building Water Futures thinks forward through the arts and humanities to help better understand how communities can live with water in today’s uncertain climate futures. Working with high-risk communities in coastal zones and estuaries worldwide, we assess opportunities to engage communities with water challenges and increase uptake of resilience actions through community arts, learning histories, digital education, citizen inquiry methods and other creative solutions.
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