Coasts are resurging worldwide, as centers of commerce, nodes in global supply chains, and geopolitical borders. Coastal areas are undergoing massive reconstruction as governments mobilize capital and technology to protect inhabited shorelines against storm floods but also undesired migrants. Coastal securitization and fortification – often large-scale infrastructure projects in the form of sea walls and military checkpoints – sit uneasily with conservationist concerns and human rights. Coasts are not just important sites of control and earth management but also zones of conflict and contestation, as indigenous groups and environmentalist organizations question plans for extensive land reclamation and unsustainable urban development.
This panel addresses the broader social and cultural consequences of coastal transformations through the concept of coastalization. We invite panelists to closely examine coastal infrastructures and their role in attracting and rerouting (un)desired flows of materials, ideas, and people. What types of connection and relations does the resurgence of coasts (re)produce? What are the new intersections of environment, economy, and power driven by coastal dynamics? We invite dense ethnographic accounts that explore the novel more-than-human connections created at water’s edge. Panelists may show new ways of dwelling at, protecting, building, and engineering shores. We are particularly interested in reterritorializations of coasts – spatial mutations and infrastructural shifts – that let coasts shape terrestrial and maritime worlds beyond the immediate material encounter of land and sea. Panelists may think with the coast as a “meeting place,” sites of multispecies entanglement, or conceptual figure to reveal the coastal moment in globalization.