Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores a series of participatory textiles workshops that used arts and history to understand the city of Hull’s long heritage of living with water and flooding. The creative outputs from these workshops show the crucial opportunity offered by participatory textiles for elevating everyday, marginalised and ‘unofficial’ stories, but also pose challenges for the integration of this material within some academic literatures.

Paper Abstract:

Between 2020 and 2024 the Risky Cities project (part of the UK Climate Resilience Programme) used arts and history to understand the city of Hull’s long heritage of living with water and flooding. The project’s community engagement work took archival and literary stories of Hull’s watery histories and used them as inspiration for a range of creative and participatory activities.

These included an intensive season of participatory textile workshops, working with local artist-practitioners and flood-impacted communities around the city to create a range of embroidered and woven textile pieces that respond in different ways to Hull’s flood history.

This paper outlines the process of these workshops, and explores the outputs created during them and exhibited as part of the ‘Follow the Thread’ exhibition. These textiles include whimsical, challenging, and abstracted perceptions of Hull’s flood history, encoding memories of the city’s last major flood event in 2007. In particular, we discuss the importance of participatory arts in uncovering previously hidden traumatic histories, echoing experiences elsewhere about the impact of peer-to-peer story-telling in the context of climate-induced disasters, including the impact on artist practitioners as well as academics.

This work shows the crucial opportunity offered by participatory textiles for elevating everyday, marginalised and ‘unofficial’ stories, but also poses challenges for the integration of this material within the socio-hydrological academic literature, the discourses of which are still dominated by quantitative, ‘scientific’ approaches to generating new knowledge.