Exploring Coastal Societies and Knowledge in Transition Across Generations

Today, more than half of the world’s population lives within one hundred miles of an ocean. However, in seeking to understand the status and future of human societies, researchers in the social sciences and humanities have tended to focus on the landlocked world rather than interrogating the importance of coastlines and seascapes and the communities that inhabit them. As Jacobsen (2009, p. 28) argued, we need to reclaim the “thin world where land meets sea,” which, except in the case of large coastal cities, has long been overlooked.

This chapter is an introduction to the book exploring questions related to social and cultural sustainability of coastal communities in transition through the lenses of childhood and knowledge across three generations in cross-national contexts. A central theme throughout the volume is to investigate interconnections between education, subsistence, everyday life, and quality of life in coastal communities, an area that has been underexplored in the literature of several disciplines. The theoretical and methodological perspectives underpinning the volume are presented, followed by a mapping of the different chapters.