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.