Care-ful encounters: A case for empathetic youthful encounters with coastal environments

This paper extends discourse on environmental stewardship and coastal management by examining the intersecting and overlapping relationships between notions of care and encounter in generating and maintaining forms of environmental empathy among young people at various socio-spatial scales. Exploring ‘care-ful encounters’ matters in terms of developing new ways of understanding how the choreographies of care and self-care shape, and are shaped by, encounters with human and non-human others, and prompts critical engagement and reflection with care as felt and experienced, that could otherwise be considered as distanced and ‘over there‘. Two key contributions emerge—first, that the combined role of care and encounter shapes young people's care-giving practices in active, relational and socially interconnected ways, and second, in acknowledging how visceral practices of emotional and affective encounters problematise the intersections between responsibility and risk in terms of young people's practices of self-care. Taken collectively, this critical investigation of empathetic and care-ful encounters reveals the intense ethical and moral significance of caring praxis that are performed up close and through tactile and tangible experiences with the material, emotional and symbolic characteristics of coastal environments, and the ways in which care-ful encounters can shape senses of citizenship, well-being and community for those experiencing them.