Chronicle to Core: flood histories, resilience & community engagement

Background

Are you passionate about history, environmental science and coastal resilience? Join our ground-breaking project integrating historical sources and environmental science approaches with digital humanities and creative community engagement. This exciting PhD project will work in transdisciplinary ways to shed new light on how people lived with, and adapted to, water and floods in coastal zones over thousands of years.

What will you do?

Using an innovative combination of methods, the PhD project will:

1. Reconstruct flood histories: Generate new knowledge about when, where and how often chosen case study regions flooded over a period of several thousand years, and the technologies, physical infrastructure and socio-legal arrangements used in managing, governing, and adapting to water and flood.
2. Correlate archives and sediments: Link sediment proxy-based records of flooding with the historical archive, so as to better understand the date, frequency and magnitude of known flood events c.1000 AD onwards, and uncover previously unknown flood events.
3. Engage communities creatively: Apply digital humanities approaches and creative community engagement to co-showcase the history and heritage of our coasts. Develop and evaluate innovative tools for engaging young people and local communities in building climate awareness and coastal resilience for the future.

Why this matters

The project thereby generates new knowledge and innovative methodologies so as empower communities to think forward through the past and better live with water today and in the future.