DPU's Liza Griffin receives Bartlett Policy Support Fund 2023 for arts-based policy engagement

The project, which received £4k funding from the Bartlett Policy Support Fund 2023, focuses on social sustainability and resilience in a notoriously divided sector.  Social sustainability and resilience are fundamental not only for UK fisheries and struggling fishing communities, but they are also a strategic policy area for current national policymaking (DEFRA 2022; Griffin 2023). Social sustainability concerns the formal and informal processes and institutions that enable current and future generations to live well together and produce liveable communities. Resilient fishing communities are not only more socially sustainable but are also better able to withstand the manifold challenges they face. They possess many of the skills, networks, resources and capacities that can help them flourish.

However, inshore fisheries in the UK face severe pressure from numerous directions including climate change, coastal urban development rising costs and poor regulation (Griffin 2014). Despite its vulnerability, fishing directly or indirectly sustains or contributes to the socio-economic welfare of many coastal regions and supports livelihoods well beyond the catching sector.

Our arts-based policy engagement involves reflection and directed discussions between stakeholders around a creative artefact called a 'sonic postcard'.

The sonic postcard called 'Fishing for Life' is a 14-minute sound-work co-created with stakeholders, fishers, researchers (including Griffin and Revill) and a sound artist for a UKRI research art-engagement project called Sounding Coastal Change (SCC). SSC focuses on environmental and social change on the North Norfolk Coast.

Fishing for Life is being hosted at Wells Maltings Arts Centre and explores the social, economic and environmental challenges facing fishing communities and the strategies that fishers use to cope with them. It is one of several sonic postcards made by SCC. Postcards are co-produced pieces made by publics, researchers and sound artists working together in ways which creatively assemble and voice otherwise ‘unheard’ human and non-human voices. They work with sound, voice, music and different kinds of listening to explore the ways in which the North Norfolk coast is changing and how people’s lives are changing with it.

Sonic postcards do not tell or instruct, but instead, raise awareness to enhance sensitivity and attentiveness to issues that might otherwise be unnoticed (Revill and Griffin in press). They each respond to a local issue of concern mooted in conversations with project partners and they 'presence' previously overlooked issues of concern. SCC uses postcards to explore possibilities for an expanded politics in relation to environmental decision-making and the imagining of environmental futures (Revill 2021). 

Photo Credit - Unloading the catch at Wells-Next-The-Sea, Chris Bonfiglioli, 2023)