Changing childhoods in coastal communities

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue explores coastal living, foregrounding the experiences of childhood across time and place. The contributions come from the international, interdisciplinary project titled ‘Valuing the past, sustaining the future: Education, knowledge and identity across three generations in coastal communities’ which was carried out in coastal communities in Norway, the Faroe Islands, Ireland, Cyprus and Australia. Coastal childhoods in communities undergoing rapid economic and social change are explored, providing rich empirical insight into questions of identity, belonging and attachment to place. Most contributors adopt an intergenerational lens to examine change through time, placing children’s lives and childhoods within the social context of their families and communities as well as the globalised world of the twenty-first century.

KEYWORDS:

• Coastal childhoods
• intergenerational
• belonging
• identities
• communities

Introduction

Children living in coastal communities, at the water’s edge, between the sea and the hinterland, have an everyday life with the view of the ocean promising ‘an endless horizon’ (Boon, Butler, and Jefferies 2018, 2). The soothing sound of water, a tacit part of early childhood memories, and movements at the seaside, the liminal space between the fluid and solid, make the coastal place meaningful as location (Cresswell 2004, 7). ‘The ocean sang over me a lullaby, the surf put me to sleep’, writes Jákup Dahl in a verse from the Faroe Islands. The shorelines are scenes of ‘exchange rather than a boundary between two distinct spaces’ (Steinberg and Kristoffersen 2017) and children from coastal communities, located on small islands as well as on the mainland, will often have the waterfront as playground. Coastal zones of small island contexts, symbolising the conflict ‘between openness and closure’ (Baldacchino 2007, 165), do also act as ‘cultural crossroads where hybridisation frequently occurs’ (Hosokawa 1994). As the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen has emphasised: ‘water tends to unite; mountains tend to divide’ (1993, 135). Beachcombing, searching for driftwood and other alien objects (‘matter out of place’) on the beach, is part of children’s play and everyday life in many coastal communities. The water transports wreckage from faraway places.

The short documentary The Children of Fogo Island (Low 1967) from Atlantic Canada is a beautiful presentation of children’s lives at the water’s edge. It illustrates the creativity, local knowledge and culture of children in a small island community threatened by depopulation. Aitken (2010) writes about the mythical relation between children and animals in the ocean referring to the 1937 film The Edge of the World, which tells the story of the evacuation of the island of St. Kilda (Outer Hebrides of Scotland). It is, Aitken argues, also about ‘the edge of modernity’. Children in coastal communities learn about the sea through experience, folktales and myths. The sea symbolises risk and danger, because of its unpredictable nature, yet at the same time also freedom and adventure. The wayfarer is often a seafarer (Ingold 2011). Nevertheless, some coastal communities turn their back to the sea, ignoring their location at the water’s edge because of the unattractive and unproductive seashore. The Mi’kmaq (Atlantic Canada) writer Shannon Webb-Campbell says about her homely ocean: ‘The Atlantic changes you. It’s tough love, but there is nothing like it’ (Boon, Butler, and Jefferies 2018). The ocean and islands should be studied mutually, according to Pugh, and ‘the sea foregrounds questions of flux’ (2016, 1043). People’s wistful gaze on the sea might sometimes imply a desire to move away, but it can also echo a sense of attachment to the place, which serves as lookout. ‘Our house overlooked the sea’, says a woman in retrospect about her childhood in a seaside town in Jamaica, ‘and I think that this set part of the pattern, because the sea was there, and we could just look across to the sea’ (Olwig 2007, 262). Children and young people in coastal communities generally express strong attachment to the place: the water, sky and land, flows and boundaries, edges and interiors, isolation and access (Stratford 2008). At the same time, they are aware that they might decide to ‘drop anchor’ in new places in the future. Collective identities based on locality, according to Paulgaard (2002, 104), ‘might represent a sense of security, and an attempt to “fix the flow” and mark boundaries in the ongoing globalization process’. The endless horizon of the ocean, giving a sense of being at the crossroad between the closeness of place and the infinity of the universe (Lems 2018, 213), forms the childhood memories of people from coastal communities.

This Special Issue explores coastal living, foregrounding the experiences of childhood across time and place. Five of the six contributions come from the international, interdisciplinary project titled ‘Valuing the past, sustaining the future: Education, knowledge and identity across three generations in coastal communities’ which was carried out in coastal communities in Norway, the Faroe Islands, Ireland, Cyprus and Australia (Tasmania). The research project is funded by Research Council Norway and directed by Anne Trine Kjørholt, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The sixth article is an anthropological contribution from a small island community in Norway. Taken together the six contributions explore coastal childhoods in communities undergoing rapid economic and social change providing rich empirical insight into questions of identity, belonging and attachment to place. Most contributors adopt an intergenerational lens to examine change through time, placing children’s lives and childhoods within the social context of their families and communities as well as the globalised world of the twenty-first century. Within this context, the articles examine the role of local knowledge and its intergenerational transmission alongside the role of formal education and its effects, especially for the younger people who are called upon to respond to predominantly neoliberal, individualising economic regimes.

Childhood, generation and social change

From the early 1980s social studies of children and childhood (childhood studies) have conceptualised childhood as a social phenomenon, as culturally situated and mediated by local thinking, values and traditions (Qvortrup 1993; James, Jencks, and Prout 1998). Despite this, childhood is still often conceptualised and represented as a universal ideal, as a protected space from adulthood, connected to play, school and family life (Montgomery 2017), leaving the varieties of different childhoods as these are conceptualised and practised in diverse local contexts on the globe, to a great extent unexplored. This is evident both in global policies and some childhood research, thus producing particular global and universal images of what it means to be a child.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has played a key role in global policies and childhood studies, conceptualising contemporary children as individual right-claimers, including rights to participate and to have a say in matters that affect their lives. Rights discourses have undoubtedly contributed to improved well-being and the empowerment of children. However, the powerfulness of these discourses in changing intergenerational structures should not be underestimated. In spite of the key perspective of childhood as socially constructed, the CRC and the powerful global political plea for children’s voices have paradoxically rarely been investigated as itself socially constructed. Quite on the contrary, a review of research on children’s voice and rights to participation conducted at the beginning of this century concluded that the research was characterised by ‘universalising and normative assumptions about the self-evident value of children’s participation rather than providing a critical scrutiny of political discourses’ (Kjørholt 2004, 32). A similar point has also recently been underlined by Hammersley, arguing that childhood studies is akin to a ‘social movement’ concerned with advocating for children’s rights (Hammersley 2017 in Canosa and Graham 2020, 34). The construction of children as rights claimers alongside an accelerating emphasis on children and adults as users and consumers can be traced to neo-liberal discourses and the construction of the autonomous, self-determining subject in late modern societies. In addition, social media and mediated representations of selfhood have become increasingly significant for young people today. Individuals are required to undertake work on the self – to take responsibility for their own choices as regards lifestyle, moral conduct and their own emotional wellbeing (Rose 2001).

The complex ways in which children represent an integral part in processes of economic, political and cultural reproduction in a society are hence to a great degree overlooked. Local lives are today to an increasing degree transformed and in various ways impacted by the global economy, politics and thinking. Studies of children in Sudan and New York have revealed how processes of development and global change have had similar disintegrative effects on communities in the global South and the global North (Katz 2004). There is a lack of knowledge however related to childhood and social economic change in coastal societies across time. It has been argued that to understand larger processes of change connected to reproduction and geographies of economic development, the lives of young people are increasingly important as a particular focus of investigation (Aitken, Lund, and Kjør̜holt 2008). Exploring in-depth these processes of change over time through the lens of childhood (and generation) adds to the wider analysis of change in coastal communities.

The articles in this special volume are theoretically anchored in childhood studies, conceptualising children and youth as active subjects and co-creators of their own childhoods, and childhood as a changing social phenomenon connected to a social and cultural context (James, Jencks, and Prout 1998). However, we support recent critiques of these perspectives which challenge the ways in which childhood studies has become ‘complacent and uncritical on a more theoretical level’ (Punch and Tisdall 2012, 251). We seek to contribute to an increasingly rich and critical foundation for childhood studies. Furthermore, we move beyond dominant conceptualisations of agency, which links the concept to individual autonomy and competence, and beyond a dichotomous construction of human beings as either autonomous and competent or vulnerable and dependent (Lee 1998; Kjørholt 2001, 2004; Canosa and Graham 2020; Spyrou 2018). Our analyses foreground a relational understanding of human beings as both vulnerable and autonomous, constituted in a web of interdependent human relationships. These interdependencies also include the dynamic intersection between childhood identities and the ‘natural’, material environment in particular geographical localities across time.

In order to understand the transforming lives of children and young people in coastal societies an intergenerational approach is applied. It has been argued that: ‘Children are not necessarily marked as a distinct group defined in contrast to adults, and we therefore need to examine closely the nature of relationships between people of varying ages in different cultural settings’ (Olwig and Gulløv 2003, 13). The different positions of children and adults, boys and girls, within their (extended) families, in the neighbourhood, at school, and in their local communities at a particular time, are relationally constructed. We are thus focusing on relations between different generations – young people, their parents and their grandparents – across time, in various coastal communities, in the context of wider social structural change that also shapes these intergenerational relations over time. Social identities are constituted through relations (Jenkins 2004). These social identities are not fixed but dynamic, affected by the relations between different age groups or generations that may vary (Edmunds and Turner 2002). Intergenerational relations are part of our social identities and have important implications for community cohesion, including in coastal communities. Based on the increasingly powerful discourses of individualisation in contemporary societies, we argue that it is crucial to include an intergenerational approach as a lens to understand continuity and change related to identity formation and the ways in which childhood is lived and narrated across time.

Childhoods in coastal contexts: identities and place-based attachments

Research in relation to children in coastal communities is relatively sparse and where it exists it is often in the context of rural studies literature. Further within such research, the focus has been predominantly with respect to youth, including changing constructs of youth identities (and practices) in the context of wider neo-liberal social and economic change. Prevalent then is an overlapping thread between studies of rurality, youth studies and changing social and economic conditions in coastal communities, in a wider context of glocalisation (Corbett 2005, 2007; Cuervo and Wyn 2012, 2014, 2017; Farrugia, Smyth, and Harrison 2014). An added dimension in recent years is conservation projects and the impact on local livelihoods (Moshy, Bryceson, and Mwaipopo 2015).

Consistently literature points to the impact of the closure of small local fishing enterprises arising from the consolidation of the fishing industry for example EU regulations and quotas. Power, Norman, and Dupré (2014) examined the impact of fisheries closures on young people (12–24 years old) in Newfoundland and Labrador highlighting their negative perception of work in the fishing industry. Similar findings apply in Norway and Alaska (Lowe et al. 2012). While the high school students in Lowe et al.’s research (2012) did not see any future for themselves in the fishing sector, they still expressed a preference for working in the outdoors overpursuing occupations in office-related roles. Changes in opportunity in coastal communities are also noted in research in the global South, where environmental degradation and the establishment of marine conservation zones impacts for example on livelihood possibilities (and food security) in Tanzania (Moshy, Bryceson, and Mwaipopo 2015). Similarly, research in coastal Kenya examines the lives of children showing that while traditional values remain important, both adults and children recognise the necessity of melding traditional practices with neo-liberal agendas. Rahardjo, Wardono, and Suminar (2015) in their study in Indonesia highlight the centrality of family relationships in sustaining community resilience in the face of such threats to traditional fishing livelihoods. Research in Ghana highlights children’s contribution to local fisheries and the positive contribution to their own identity construction (Sackey and Johannesen 2015).

This connection between place and identity emerges with respect to some of the research in the field. Cuervo and Wyn (2017) for example cite the importance of strong social relationships built on locality and community in rural environments. What often emerges is a strong emotional sense of attachment to a particular place where such a place feels as ‘home’ and accordingly, to belong means to find a place where an individual can feel ‘at home’ (Antonsich 2010, 646), given that questions of ‘who we are’ are frequently interlinked with questions of ‘where we are’ (Dixon and Durrheim 2000, 27). For people living in coastal communities and fishing families in particular, these questions seem pivotal. One common issue that emerges is the centrality of fishing as a way of life in addition to being a source of income, what van Ginkel (2009, 298) underlines as ‘a source of pride and identity, intrinsically a raison d’être’. The activities which take place at sea, on the boat, at the harbour and beyond constitute not only fishermen’s professional identities (and ways of earning a living) but also a sense of collective coastal community identity which comes about because of participating in a ‘cultural ecosystem’ (Urquhart and Acott 2014, 5). Thus, living in coastal communities is linked to the ways people articulate themselves and their community through the meanings constructed by fishing activities. This includes the social and economic interactions that professional fishermen engage in and which contribute to the social cohesion of fishing communities (Nunan et al. 2018) as well as the interrelationship between the natural (e.g. landscape) and the non-natural features (e.g. buildings, gear, etc.) of the physical environment (Urquhart and Acott 2014).

Some scholars who have engaged with the socio-cultural spaces of the sea and coastal communities reject the dichotomy between the physical environment and the non-natural elements (Bear 2017; Bull 2011; Satizábal and Dressler 2019). This is important when discussing notions of attachment to place and sense of belonging and identity in the context of coastal communities. As Urquhart and Acott (2014, 15) suggest, fishing activity:

puts into motion a series of events that shapes the physical landscape, which in turn creates a material reality within which identities (place, individual, and community) are constructed. This co-construction then forms the basis on which fishing activity is perpetuated and provides an important link between activities on the sea that are then translated into places on land.

It is this dialectic which creates people’s embodied realities in coastal communities, in turn forging their identities, both individual and collective. A temporal dimension to identity construction also informs a sense of belonging and attachment to place. Memories constitute a crucial part of the construction of place and to questions of ‘who we are’. They offer an anchor for identity, embedding spaces, pasts, and futures in specific locales through an interweaving of the spatial and the temporal (Leyshon and Bull 2011). Of note also is the blurring of boundaries through digital technologies (Sheller 2014), especially social media, reducing the traditional geographical divide ‘at the speed of a mouse click’ between the urban and rural (Dolby and Rizvi 2008, 5). With the Covid 19 pandemic, such trends have become more pronounced.

For young people in rural coastal communities’ challenges over identity construction and attachment to place arise at the intersection of present lived experience and aspirations for success in their future lives. Through the use of photo voice, Power, Norman, and Dupré (2014) highlight the positive sense of place/community of the young people in their research, despite their recognition of the lack of employment opportunities in the fishing industry. For many, outward migration is the most likely response. Juvonen and Romakkaniemi (2019, 322) refer to the burden on rural youth who are called upon to make decisions about their life trajectories in a context of constant structural changes in education and the labour market. The ‘pull’ of mobility to urban centres arising from expectations for higher education as well as the need for skilled employment in a more mobile flexible economy, is consistently evident (Farrugia 2014; Haukanes 2013; Corbett 2007; Lowe et al. 2012). This stretching of identities across time and space, from rural/coastal to urban through migration is itself reflective of an ‘elective belonging’ by these young people (Cuervo and Wyn 2012, 2017). It is a conscious choice by those who have the resources to do so, to fashion a more mobile and flexible identity trajectory to be ‘successful’ (Cuervo 2014; Corbett 2007). Yet such decisions do not come easily. As Corbett (2007, 772), in his study on Canadian rural youth’s mobility suggests, being mobile constitutes a necessity for many young people that requires them to ‘forget place-based identities and to assume mobile and flexible self-constructions’. Lowe (2015, 4) similarly points to the disillusionment of coastal youth in northern Alaska as they navigate tensions between local embeddedness and the cultural capital requirements for entry to universities.

Literature also refers to the importance of gender in these processes, deeply embedded in traditional rural and coastal communities (Deb, Emdad Haque, and Thompson 2015; Santos 2015), and of the gender-related changes that arise with the closure of traditional fish production. At a very fundamental level, as Kleiber et al. (2017, 745) have suggested ‘women and men often perform different roles in fisheries labour, and those roles are often given different cultural importance’. Consequently, women’s role in fishing has been marginalised, as they have not been seen as fishers by either men or women even though their role has been crucial to the longevity of fisheries (Gerrard and Kleiber 2019) and by extension of coastal communities. Taking a socio-ecological perspective, Neis, Siri, and Power (2013) critique the gender and generational blindness in fishing policy in Norway, Newfoundland and Labrador resulting in a lack of opportunities for women (traditionally involved in fish processing) as local enterprise fisheries close and opportunities for fishing rely on larger enterprises and extended time out on sea. The absence of opportunities for women contributes to a cycle of small fishery decline, in addition to reducing the attractiveness of fishing to young people in these communities. The authors also point to the lack of inter-generational transfer of knowledge (typically patrilineal) with local knowledge of fishing stocks and location being increasingly replaced with the need for formal training in technical skills and regions considerably farther out to sea. Santos (2015) similarly draws attention to the contribution of women to artisanal fisheries in Brazil, preparing shrimp for the market, extracting shellfish from the seashore and the preservation of traditional methods. Their role in simultaneously caring for young children ensures that the children are inducted from an early age into a fishing way of life that is central to the sustainability of the artisanal fishing industry.

Childhoods, generation and sustainability in coastal contexts

Explorations of childhood across time in small coastal communities necessarily raise issues of sustainability. Resources that were once the lifeblood of coastal communities have been depleted and ecological systems have been degraded and exploited. Extreme weather events and climate change impact both terrestrial and marine systems, with deep implications for both coastscapes and the communities that depend upon them. There is a huge generation difference in the impact of these changes, making children extremely vulnerable as the group being most affected. Since late 2018, young people around the world have been leading climate demonstrations, and the absence of sufficiently ambitious climate policies is turning into a generation conflict (Luthen, Ryan, and Wakefield 2021). The economic viability of some small communities appears increasingly precarious. The research presented in this book shows that children and young people have had a key role as significant economic actors, contributing to sustain coastal livelihoods and fishing communities in previous generations, thus representing a corrective to the generational blindness in fishing policies in Norway (Neis, Siri, and Power 2013). Furthermore, we argue that children are essential in creating sustainable coastal communities today and in future. Sustainability is linked to our relational understanding of children – and human beings in general – as being both vulnerable and autonomous, constituted in a web of interdependent, intergenerational relationships between human beings, but also, between human beings and ‘nature’. These interdependencies constitute a sense of collective coastal community identity, of crucial importance for creating viable coastal communities in the future, economic, environmental, social and cultural.

The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda identifies three pillars of sustainability: economic, environmental and social. These pillars are presented as being of equal importance and mutually reinforcing. Yet, as Weber (2017) has observed, economic sustainability is often prioritised, reflecting the dominance of neo-liberal ideology and an emphasis on the role of the market. Our approach takes a broad definition of sustainability, building on that of the Sustainable Development Agenda, and encompassing economic, environmental, social, and cultural sustainability (Bessell and Kjørholt, 2022). By including cultural sustainability, we aim to highlight the attitudes, values, and practices within which wellbeing, creativity, diversity, and innovation play out (Hawkes 2001). While social sustainability illuminates the institutions and social patterns that shape a society, cultural sustainability has the potential to provide insights into the values that underpin and inform them (Hawkes 2001; Yenken and Wilkinson 2000; Soini and Birkeland 2014). Conceptualising sustainability as comprising these four pillars enables a deeper understanding of the forces at play within the small coastal communities on which the Valuing the Past, Sustaining the Future project focuses. It also helps to uncover what is considered valuable within those communities, across and within generations, and how different forms of knowledge are – and can be – sustained over time.

Our approach to sustainability is also generational, recognising that ways of living and ways of knowing are not only shaped by gender, class, age and so on, but also shift over time. Over the second half of the twentieth century, standards of living have generally risen in each of the communities that are the focus of this Special Issue, as incomes improved and market forces increasingly shaped the lives of all, including children. Associated with these shifts in the fortunes of coast-dwellers has been a rise in what Friel (2020) describes as a consumptagenic system that is based on hyperconsumerism. Within this system, economic sustainability, defined as material prosperity and a faith in unregulated market forces to deliver such prosperity (Hawkes 2001; Weber 2017), is privileged. For a period in the late twentieth century, economic sustainability – so defined – appeared attainable, often as a direct result of extractive industries that depleted natural resources and, over the longer term, threatened environmental sustainability. Today, as young people seek (and are expected to seek) opportunities for employment and education beyond their small, contained coastal homes economic sustainability no longer seems assured. The resulting anxiety and anger experienced by many children and young people are reflected in the Climate Strikes. Social and cultural sustainability are also under pressure, in large part as a result of the exodus of young people (Easthope and Gabriel 2008; Corbett 2008). Moreover, the ecological balance associated with environmental sustainability has been undermined in many of these communities. Consequently, all pillars of sustainability are coming under some level of threat. This, in turn, results in the current generation of young people facing choices and challenges that were less acute for their parents and grandparents, and raises issues of intergenerational inequality. Sustainability into the future, requires a deep understanding of each of the pillars discussed here, interrogation of the meaning of each in the past and in the present, and awareness of (sometimes competing) visions for the future, particularly the visions held by children.

Researching childhoods in coastal contexts – a three-generational and biographical approach

In addressing these themes, five of the six contributions in this Special Issue follow the same general methodological design for researching three generations of coastal community residents using a biographical approach developed by Julia Brannen and her colleagues (Brannen, Moss, and Mooney 2004; Wengraf 2001). Apart from the biographical interviews, the methods used included participant observation and focus group discussions. The three generations researched in the cross-national study include the grandparents, parents and children and roughly cover the period from 1945 to the present. Key topics explored in the study included the nature of changing social relationships across the three generations through time, as well as learning and knowledge transmission in relation to both formal and informal education. We also contextualise childhoods as they are perceived within their extended families and explore educational continuities and discontinuities along intergenerational lines.

Retrospective methods have been criticised for being prone to inaccuracy due to the nature of human memory (Parry, Thompson, and Fowkes 1999). Retrospective empirical material – as all empirical material – is subjective and selective, chosen consciously or subconsciously in acts of self-representation. Gullestad (1996) suggested overcoming the polarisation of narratives as either historical facts or poetic fiction by emphasising that the ‘impurities’ of distortions are valuable when we seek informants’ social meaning. The ways in which individuals from the different generations narrate their own biographical stories have yielded rich data about the mix of values, personal circumstances, structural conditions and social contexts that have shaped both their past and present experiences and the significance and meanings they accord to these. A cross-national and comparative approach (Hantrais and Mangen 1996) with the aim of identifying similarities and differences between the various contexts examined within and across countries was adopted. Through the study of coastal childhoods across three generations (taking the time frame from 1945 to present) the special issue includes articles from different coastal communities in five countries, based on life-biographies across three generations, thus contextualising empirical studies of childhood in time and space.

A particular emphasis is on intergenerational relations as these vary through time and space, and which are dynamically intertwined with childhoods as these are conceptualised and practised. The countries (Norway, Ireland, Cyprus, Australia, Faroe Islands) reflect global dynamics of economic change as well as particularistic features related to local history and context. Furthermore, the special issue represents a contribution to theoretical perspectives of the value of intergenerational approaches to studies of children and childhood. In addition, the inter-disciplinary underpinnings bring added richness and a distinct focus to each of the papers, which are written as cross-cutting themes. Central among these are inter-generational connectedness and the building of a sense of continuity and social solidarity both within and across generations in times of profound change; the strong attachment to the land and the sea as key markers of identity that have remained relatively stable over time; the resilience, innovation and flexibility of younger generations as they seek to marry formative influences from the past with opportunities in the future and finally the impact of education (and changing opportunity structures) and gender in mediating aspirations for, and dispositions to, living in rural coastal communities.

Concluding discussion – overview of papers

A theme of community cohesion in times of change permeates Kjørholt’s research in a cluster of small islands in the mid-western Atlantic shores of Norway. She traces the profound change in work, economy, demography and socio-cultural life as islanders forge new forms of belonging in the transition from a small traditional fishing community to an ethnically diverse booming centre for fish farming, with all of the attendant challenges and opportunities this brings. To the fore is a continuum of ‘degrees’ of rootedness, belonging and displacement among interviewees, alongside the building of collective memories, even for those perceived as outsiders. The impact of rapid and intense change for young people is especially strong, as they navigate between local and global discourses of place-making, belonging and home making. Shared narratives of the past sit alongside more individualised trajectories centred on education, lifestyle, and alternate visions of homemaking and living – as global citizens amidst a world of possibilities. Despite differences, a deep connection to the sea across all generations is evident, with a desire by most to remain.

In another Norwegian island community of 100 residents, far out to sea, Beyer Broch delves deeply into everyday life among cod fishermen in Northern Norway. Through a comparative analysis across two time periods (2006 and 2019) he traces the flexible and resilient adaptation of community members in the shadows of national and international policies in relation to the fishing sector. Issues of gender arise in the analysis of the ‘maleness’ of the fishery, the strength and bravery out in the rough seas, the draw of the ‘thrill and risk’ of the catch, and the ‘heroic status’ of the fishermen in the local community. Sisterhood is also in evidence among women, amidst the shared solidarity of rearing children in what is perceived as a safe environment with a high quality of life. Complex processes of place, identity and economy are detailed, including the impact of outward and inward migration of young people, especially on community sustainability, as they draw on their multiple experiences to establish small-scale enterprises, using new marine resources to carve out sustainable livelihoods.

Experiences of childhood in a coastal community on the Faroe Islands are the focus of Gaini’s paper. Drawing on narratives across three generations of childhoods in the past, present and future, he traces the strong social cohesion and cultural continuity evident in one community of 1100 inhabitants, based on a proud sense of history of the place. Importantly, it is this ‘rootedness’ through bonds to family, nature and history, that provides a strong foundation for young people to choose to remain, inspired by childhoods relatively free by modern standards, never far from the ‘water’s edge’. Evident also is a renegotiation of local identities – the melding of modern technologies, ease of travel and modern life-styles through local–global interconnectedness, that is sustaining life on the islands amidst an also thriving fishing industry. Local knowledge and sustainable personal networks appear key to the creation of new successful and local enterprises, inspired by a flexible unbroken continuity across the generations.

Attachment to place and the sea is also evident in the reconstituted narratives of childhoods across time in two rural coastal communities along the Atlantic sea-board in Ireland. In their paper, Crummy and Devine delve into the identity positioning of young people against the backdrop of wider social change, that brings with it substantive risk as well as opportunities for new spaces for learning and belonging. In an increasingly globalised and competitive environment, discrepancies arise between what is expected of young people in terms of education and work in the global market, and what their coastal community can offer in terms of a financially sustainable future. Most notably, a transition from informal learning/working expectations around the home, farm and sea, to investments within (formal) education as a ‘new working narrative’ of (expected) childhood, has emerged, influenced not only by global trends but also intergenerational value systems and emotional ties. Evident was strategic acts of negotiation by young people, linking local knowledge (related for example to food practices) with opportunities brought by more advanced education elsewhere, with new narratives of survival and livelihood (alongside constructions of childhood) evolving over time. As with other papers, kinship structures, community solidarity deeply connected to the land and the sea were consistently emphasised.

Childhood as temporal order is brought to the fore in the analysis by Spyrou, Theodorou and Stylianidou of a small fishing community in Cyprus. They highlight how important both the past and the future is, over and above the present, to the construction and understanding of childhood. Here a nuanced exploration is provided of how three generations of Greek Cypriot males create meaning and identity through their attachment to place and fishing. Considering their ‘fishy’ childhoods, the authors identify the broader processes of cultural, social and economic change. Paramount is the threat to traditional ways of ‘fishing’ livelihoods as young people seek other opportunities, reinforced through opportunities for higher levels of education. Core questions arise in relation to the rupturing of inter-generational dynamics of transmission through these profound shifts in opportunity structures. They also note the continuity that is reflected across each generation in the strong emotional attachment to the sea and forms of apprenticeship across generations in skills needed for boat building and fishing.

In her analysis of life in a coastal community in Tasmania, Australia, Bessell similarly outlines the deep emotional connection to home among her participants. Across all generations, the centrality of the natural environment in shaping identity is evident. Strong markers of identity related to being an islander and ‘coastal’ come to the fore in spite of significant differences over time in relation to lifestyle and aspirations. The freedom of the younger generation to carve out a future unimaginable to their grandparents is highlighted. Bessell also brings out clearly how young people’s trajectories are characterised by a continuing desire to resist overly individualised narratives of ‘success and material accumulation’ of twenty-first century living. Evident is their aspiration to live their lives meaningfully, including for those who had migrated, a desire to return to their coastal home. Across generations, participants described learning from one another as a cherished part of close-knit relationships, and as central to a sense of identity and belonging. Inter-generational learning through cooking, building/construction and hunting and fishing but also IT skills from young to old helped consolidate and deepen inter-generational bonds in the context of wider social and economic change.

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Research Council of Norway.