Matthew Howells

Coastal communities have long been at the periphery of human geography. Nonetheless, the coasts present a rich context to understand and deconstruct processes of displacement—enclosure, ocean grabbing, gentrification, and financialization—and the salience of adjacency claims as resistance. While scholars have theorized that the coast’s spatial specificity may enable communities to raise adjacency claims, scholarship has not reconciled the degree to which coastal communities should benefit from marine resources and ocean spaces. This displacement-adjacency framework and research agenda provide a lens to study discourses, cases of contestation, and the potency of such protests of interrelated coastal displacement processes.