(Re-)valuing and co-creating cultures of water: a transdisciplinary methodology for weaving a live tapestry of Blue Heritage

ABSTRACT

This article develops a transdisciplinary methodology for valuing and co-creating ‘tapestries’ of Blue Heritage. Given impending threats to the environmental sustainability and maintenance of Cultural Heritage surrounding oceans and freshwaters, it is increasingly urgent to develop a methodology that addresses the significance of the past and its rapport with the continuous future creation and valuing of what we here develop as ‘Cultures of Water’. This idea encompasses water-related practices that occur in various ways across diverse groups and arenas. Therefore, the proposed methodology is informed by several disciplines, notably History, Ethnography, Cultural Heritage, Arts, Design, Planning, and Geography. It emphasises the creation of a continuously evolving and changing tapestry of knowledge, jointly threaded by local populations, governmental and non-governmental institutions at various levels, industries, businesses, and academia. The tapestry is woven by connecting diverse disciplinary methodologies along specific threads, three on content and six on methods and related key questions. This article presents the methodology and reflects on its practicability and potential based on autoethnographic reflections, literature reviews, and first findings from implementing parts of the methodology in northern Portugal.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultures of water
• blue heritage
• co-creation
• transdisciplinary methodologies
• citizen science

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank their research centre, CITCEM-FLUP, for continuous financial and logistical support (see also funding details), and of course all the participants of NEI, FIC.A and of the Lab.CA - Laboratories of Cultures of Water.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We consciously choose to engage with ‘transdisciplinarity’ rather than multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, or other related concepts, because we wish to emphasise the idea of placing disciplines into dialogue and benefitting from their complementarity, recognising their differences but also engaging their commonalities to find places of convergence. We are aware of extensive literature on these diverse terms (e.g. Ingold 2011; Lawrence 2015; Nicolescu 2014) but rather than recounting the debate here, we make the conscious and explicit choice for transdisciplinarity, defining what we mean by it as we use it here.

2. The written interview is based on the idea of the narrative interview, which leaves the writer free to share what they think matters concerning a relatively open question, and allows the interviewee to structure their argument with only the researchers’ initial questions as guidance and influence (see the method used in Nikolaeva et al. 2022). This structure made sense here also because the respondents were co-authors of this article, and this made it easier to create a distance from the research at hand to respond to the broader questions, as well as giving a more reflective answer, less connected to what the researchers already knew about each other. The written interview could then be discussed and interpreted by each researcher about the others, and by all together, for this article.

3. Naturally, this autoethnographic process is highly prone to bias, but as the interest was not so much in identifying unbiased results but rather facilitating the explicit identification and sharing of transdisciplinary insights, the bias was embraced, rather than checked, and is openly reported here. The authors acknowledge their positionality and inclination towards transdisciplinary thinking and openly make use of this for this article.

4. Both events were entirely voluntary for participants and had an ethical clearance for interaction, and use of results from interactions.

5. Participation was entirely voluntary and with written permission from the teachers for the use of the images. The teachers had gotten respective permission from parents beforehand.

6. Nevertheless, this article is based only on the researchers’ own reflections emerging from the interactions, summarising points of discussion and leaving no information traceable to individual participants.

7. Rio Neiva is an environmental NGO, whose essential objectives are to defend and enhance the local environment and the natural and cultural heritage, so as to promote a balanced regional development of the Neiva River Valley in the North of Portugal. Bind´-Ó-Peixe is a cultural association based in Vila do Conde, Porto metropolitan area, whose mission is to enhance the coastal heritage of Northeast Portugal in close collaboration with local populations.

8. Participants included people from the local municipality where the film was shown, some of the people interviewed in the film, people from local NGOs, and some otherwise uninvolved residents of the area.

9. For example, see Koolen, Kamps, and de Keijzer (2009) on the transdisciplinary requirements for organising cultural heritage, and Gani et al. (2016) for an overview of indexing methods. Gilliland and Mckemmish (2004) provide a useful overview of methods used in archival research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology under Grant UIDB/04059/2020.

Notes on contributors

Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld

Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld PhD in Land Use Planning, researcher at CITCEM, Transdisciplinary Research Centre «Culture, Space and Memory» of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, Portugal. From August 2023 she will begin a Marie-Sklodovska-Curie Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. She has been working in the area of social and environmental justice and sustainability, and seeks to address the related challenges through critical and constructive research, creativity, and public engagement. She has published widely on the subjects of participatory governance, streets as public spaces of mobility, social learning in co-creative planning, critical innovation studies, degrowth and post-growth in relation to planning.

Ana Clara Nunes Roberti

Ana Clara Roberti PhD in Design, researcher at CITCEM, Transdisciplinary Research Centre «Culture, Space and Memory» of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto and a collaborator of the Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture (ID+), of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. She is a specialist in the fields of ethnographic documentary (cinema and photography), image design and cultural studies. Clara leads artistic, social and participatory projects, mostly related to socioeconomically vulnerable urban spaces, cultural heritage, and the environment.

Bruno Lopes

Bruno Lopes PhD in History, researcher at CIDEHUS, Interdisciplinary Centre of History, Cultures and Societies of the University of Évora, Portugal, since 2023. Previously, he was researcher at CITCEM, Transdisciplinary Research Centre «Culture, Space and Memory» of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto. He works in the field of long-term societal changes, specifically with respect to the social and economic impacts of repressive institutions, namely considering the case of the Portuguese Inquisition (16th-19th centuries).

Gisele Cristina da Conceição

Gisele C. Conceição PhD in History, researcher at CITCEM, Transdisciplinary Research Centre «Culture, Space and Memory» of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, Portugal. She has been working on Early Modern History, especially the History of Science, Culture and Knowledge. Her research focuses on knowledge production processes that emphasize the entanglement and dynamics of knowledge forms in their historical making.