Transformations, crises, and contestations in narratives about environment and society on the Yorkshire North Sea and Bulgarian Black Sea coasts

This thesis explores the narrated social and environmental transformations on two distinct European coasts, the Yorkshire North Sea and the Bulgarian Black Sea. It situates each shoreline’s contemporary crises or contestations in the wider context of its ongoing environmental and political transformations. On the Yorkshire coast, it connects the clash between different marine governance visions surrounding the 2016 Referendum on Leaving the European Union to the advancement of a new oceanic legal paradigm since the Cod Wars. On the Bulgarian shore, it links contemporary conflicts over tourism (over)construction, conservation efforts, and corruption to the changing economic and knowledge politics from the establishment of the first coastal resorts during socialism to the present. To do so, the thesis analyses a range of spoken and textual narratives derived from interviews conducted during 2017-2018 fieldwork alongside literature, historical documents, media pieces, and political and legal documents.

Combining theoretical work in environmental humanities with the empirical focus of critical policy studies, the thesis positions the coast as the ideal point of departure from which to understand how communities narrate and navigate the kinds of change that increasingly characterize the Anthropocene. Arguing that awareness of what we now call the Anthropocene made an early arrival on the coast, the thesis demonstrates how the coastal communities specifically on the Yorkshire North Sea and Bulgarian Black Sea shores each draw on varying meanings of environment in order to define and uphold their place in that landscape. Through the comparison between these two shorelines, the thesis offers a contribution toward strengthening the reciprocal relationship between environmental humanities and policy for a world increasingly defined by environmental change.