Beach (No )
N/A
Organization: Media/Culture Journal
Event: No
'beach'
The beach is more than sand and surf. It is a cultural frontier where ideas of nation, leisure, labour, gender, bodies, sexuality, race, class, and belonging are played out. As a liminal zone between land and sea, it has long been invested with meanings that stretch beyond recreation: a site of myth, danger, transformation, and power. The beach is also a space of material culture and built form. Promenades, surf clubs, kiosks, heritage pavilions, apartment towers, and coastal defences shape everyday experience as much as sand and sea. It is a place of sacred meanings for Indigenous peoples, a site of moral and religious contest, and a stage for migration, tourism, and global mobility. The beach is at once natural and constructed, everyday and spectacular, historic and contemporary.
Sociologists and cultural theorists have shown that the beach is idyllic yet dangerous, free yet regulated, public yet commercialised. It is implicated in colonial dispossession, migration, and tourism, while central to contemporary anxieties about climate change and rising seas. Beaches are policed and surveilled, but also therapeutic, associated with health and rest, yet bring to the fore issues of access.
They are theatres of consumer culture and fashion, but just as powerfully they are landscapes of memory, imagination, and childhood. The beach evokes memories of family holidays and long summers, shaping collective memories across generations. It is also central to national identity, celebrated in myths of surf lifesavers, holidaymakers, and coastal belonging, where childhood play and adult nostalgia intertwine to make the shore a symbol of who we think we are.
We invite contributions that interrogate the beach as cultural site, symbolic form, and social practice. Topics may include but are not limited to:
Colonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous encounters at the shore, including beaches as sacred and storied Country
Material cultures of the beach (clothing, signage, food, photography, souvenirs)
Architecture, urban design, and heritage buildings in coastal settings
Religion, morality, and the politics of modesty, respectability, and sacred coastal practices
Beaches in film, television, art, literature, and music
Surf lifesaving, coastal sport, and leisure cultures
Class, labour, and the economies of coastal tourism and gentrification
Disability and beach accessibility
Animal and beach intersections
Race, gender, and bodies in coastal space
Migration, diaspora, and refugee arrivals at the shore
Technology and infrastructure: lifeguard towers, shark nets, drones, seawalls, desalination
Environmental politics and climate justice: erosion, rising seas, island displacement
National myths and coastal iconography (Bondi, Cronulla, Waikiki, Copacabana, Durban, Mediterranean and Pacific beaches)
The beach as everyday space: family outings, childhood, youth, holidays, popular memory
Beaches as gothic spaces, haunted, spaces of crime
Global perspectives and comparative coastal imaginaries
Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3,000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).
Details
Article deadline: 21 Aug. 2026
Release date: 21 Oct. 2026
Editors: Claire Ramos, Jo Coghlan, Lisa Hackett, and Huw Nolan
Please submit articles through this Website.
Send any enquiries to beach@journal.media-culture.org.au.
https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal
Jo Coghlan