Many pack a book to read when they set out to their beach holidays and spend some time in the sand immersed in fictional worlds. The beach offers a particular ecology for reading, embedded in the annual occurrence of the summer holiday and its rituals and practices. There are also particular books promoted as “beach reads” by publishing houses and reviews, along with perhaps more personal choices of a book that marks a meaningful moment in readers' lives.
The project will approach the beach read from two perspectives: (1) imaginaries of the ecology of the beach and (2) the emotional signatures of the “beach read”. It thereby explores how the beach read opens new perspectives on the interface between literature, emotions and the environment. The beach read is a literary practice situated in a particular ecology that currently undergoes massive changes, due to the climate crisis but also changing patterns of holidaying, and it is profoundly entwined with the emotions that readers experience or hope to experience.
Presentations of the project
- Kukkonen, Karin (May 2025): The paper “Stacked Ecologies on the Beach,” presented at the 2025 Cognitive Futures conference “Cognitive tools in action,” Messina, Italy.
- Kukkonen, Karin (June 2025): The paper “Memory, Imagination and the Stacked Ecologies,” presented at the Centre for the Sciences of Memory workshop “Cognitive aesthetics of Place,” University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
- Kukkonen, Karin (September 2025): The paper “Stacked Ecologies: Temporal and Tidal Waves in Beach Reading,” presented at the conference “Eco-Emotions on Water,” University of Oslo, Norway.