The Shifting Shorelines Global Working Group aims to understand and respond to changes in historical and present-day interfaces between land and water, both close to campus and around the world.
About the Project
In an age of intensifying floods, sea level rise, subsurface resource extraction, and freshwater scarcity, shorelines are increasingly unstable and crucial sites of both geopolitical conflict and urgent infrastructural and ecological repair. The Shifting Shorelines Global Working Group aims to understand and respond to changes in historical and present-day interfaces between land and water, both close to campus and around the world. The group brings together scholars from the arts, humanities, social sciences, sciences, and legal studies with expertise in the study of North, South and Latin America, Africa, east Asia, the Pacific, and Northern and Southern Europe, working on a range of topics, from strategic island building to coastal resilience planning, marsh drainage, ecological restoration, dam construction and river management, water rights, and pressing questions of environmental justice.
Group Members
Co-leads
Latest Work and Developments
Engagement Activities
- The group organized the following faculty and student workshops as well as public events on Northwestern University’s Evanston campus last year.
- October 2024, “Waves across the Pacific,” screening and discussion with Stefan Helmreich (MIT, Anthropology), Block Cinema
- October 2024, lunch seminar with Stefan Helmreich, author of A Book of Waves
- October 2024, “Waves Dangerous, Domesticated and Diagnostic,” public talk by Stefan Helmreich
- October 2024, “Fables of Dematerialization,” screening and discussion with Erika Balsom (King’s College London, Film Studies), Block Cinema
- May 2025, one-day workshop centered on work in progress by group co-lead Corey Byrnes and visiting scholars Harris Feinsod (Johns Hopkins, English), Jamie L. Jones (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, English), Stephen Ramos (University of Georgia, Environment and Design), Simon Richter (University of Pennsylvania, German)