Unquiet Shores: coastal acoustics and the terpsichorean ocean

18-20 June 2025, Edinburgh Napier University, Craiglockhart Campus, and Online

https://haunted-shores.com/unquiet-shores-conference-2025/  

‘Then came another rush of sea-fog, greater than any hitherto - a mass of dank mist, which seemed to close on all things like a grey pall, and left available to men only the organ of hearing, for the roar of the tempest, and the crash of the thunder, and the booming of the mighty billows came through the damp oblivion even louder than before’ - Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897), ‘Cutting from the Dailygraph, 8 August’

‘... whenever a storm was coming on, and they were afraid that some grand, beautiful ship would perish, they swam round the ships and sang to the sailors, bidding them have no fear, and telling them how beautiful it was down below. But the seamen could not understand, and thought it was the voice of the storm; they never saw the glory and beauty of the sea world, for when the ship sank they died, and only reached the sea-king’s palace as pale corpses.’ - Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid (1837)

From the hypnotic swirling of the tide around rocks and the skittering of littoral creatures dancing across the sands, to the mechanical and recreational noise of the human shore, the coast is a region readily identified by its distinctive soundscapes. This conference – co-run by the Haunted Shores and Macabre Danse networks – invites contributions that attend to the wealth of gothic, weird, and uncanny media that explore and exploit the haunting potential of the coast’s unquiet atmospheres. We are also interested in the ways in which coasts are haunted by less readily detectable sonic phenomena: consider, for instance, the submarine cables that run beneath our feet on many beaches, carrying the noise of humanity’s global communication networks up inland and far out to sea, or the distressing sight of mass whale strandings caused, it is thought, by anthropic noise in the deep ocean. 

How can we turn to gothic modes of thought in order to better comprehend the perception, production, or performance of coastal soundscapes? What can be gained by attending to the spectral or invisible dimensions of coastal ecologies, to the voices, songs, and quiet patterings and noisome crashings of the human and more-than-human world? What is gained, or lost, in capturing or responding to these elements through other mediums and modes, such as stage and screen? How can attending to the shoreline’s sound waves move us beyond anthropocentric ways of knowing the coast and bodies of water? How does the disorienting swirl of coastal fog affect our relationship with the environment and with the other bodies – human, nonhuman, or monstrous – that might also move through it? And what might be said when the unquiet shore finally falls silent?

We welcome papers, panels, or workshops on anything relating to sound or hearing on the shore, in coastal waters, or inland coastal regions, from any time period, form, media, genre, or theoretical approach – including, but not limited to, the sonic gothic, coastal studies, adaptation, the blue humanities, ballet gothic, and more. We are also very receptive to broad conceptualisations of the coast itself: the coast can be defined in more than one way – indeed, coasts are far from stable realities, geologically, politically, legally – and this conference embraces an expansive understanding of ‘coast’, in terms of how far it might extend inland and out to sea (including, for example, a nation’s continental shelf and/or Exclusive Economic Zone).

Possible topics can include but are not limited to:

• Gothic voices
• Spectral or mysterious sounds
• Music, scores, instruments
• Seabird or marine animal sound/ communication
• Waves, ripples, tsunami
• Rain, weather, storms
• Dance as response to coastal soundscapes
• Sonar and bathymetry 
• Subsea sound (human, nonhuman, mechanical)
• Diving sound
• Bioacoustics
• Noise pollution
• Multimodal performance
• Foghorns, bells, sirens
• Navigational noise
• Atmospheric noise
• Affective responses to coastal sound
• Singing, chanting, shanties, ballads
• Recordings or mixes of coastal sound/ field recordings/  marine sounds as music
• Ice & glacial sounds

We invite proposals for individual papers (200 word abstracts), pre-formed panels/ roundtables (200 word summary plus individual abstracts), or workshops (300 word summary). If you would like to propose a session that falls outside of the above categories, let us know - we are interested in interdisciplinary and multimodal scholarship.

The conference is hybrid and you can take part in person or via Teams. You may also opt into a Work in Progress session held at the end of the conference on 20 June (this means committing to submitting a 3000-word draft a month ahead, and reading 2-3 other drafts: see the submission form for details). 

Deadlines

Submit proposals here by Monday 10 February 2025.

We aim to communicate decisions by the end of February 2025.

Draft paper for Work in Progress session: submitted by 30 May 2025.

For online presentations, a recording of your talk: submitted by 9 June 2025.

Queries to unquietshores@gmail.com 

The Unquiet Shores organising team is Emily Alder, Giulia Champion, Karen Graham, Kate Harvey, Kaja Franck, Jimmy Packham, Joan Passey, and Madeline Potter.