Book Description

"In the Shadow of the Seawall journeys to the edge of the sea to understand the existential dilemma of seawalls alongside struggles for resilience and adaptation. In coastal management debates, seawalls are a deeply contested subject between those in favor of hard structures for mitigating the impacts of sea change and those who advocate measures modeled on natural processes. Summer Gray argues that both approaches involve limited notions of resilience that undermine movements for social and climate justice, and introduces the concept of placekeeping-the struggle to resist colonizing practices of displacement-as a justice-oriented framework for addressing the global dangers of coastal disruption. Drawing on a mix of ethnographic observation, interviews, and archival research, Gray shows how competing logics of adaptation play out on the ground in Guyana and the Maldives-to reveal how seawalls are entrenched in relationships of power and entangled in processes of making and keeping place"--