UCC’s Dr Sarah Kerr makes the case for working with local communities to preserve their heritage and boost climate literacy.
Dr Sarah Kerr has the insatiable curiosity that is the hallmark of a passionate academic.
“I have this annoying need to know as much about something as I possibly can. When I find something interesting, I go off down the proverbial rabbit hole,” she says.
Kerr is a lecturer in archaeology and radical humanities at University College Cork. Originally from Co Down, she completed a PhD in archaeology at Queen’s University Belfast before undertaking postdoctoral research at KU Leuven in Belgium and at Trinity College Dublin. She then worked at the University of Sheffield in the UK and at Aarhus University in Denmark. She is the recipient of a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions award.
Her archaeological work, which focuses mainly on historic buildings, has a strong interdisciplinary approach, Kerr says, because of the diverse colleagues she has worked with in various research institutions over the years.
‘Climate action is not a task to fall to future generations’
Tell us about your current research.
My research explores the relationship between heritage and climate change – not only the impacts of the latter on our built environment but how heritage and archaeology can play a role in generating and sustaining climate action. The dominant narrative is usually focused on how climate change will negatively impact heritage … but what about the other way around? I want to know how heritage can impact climate change.
Before I was working in the west of Ireland, I was on holiday there and visited Dunbeg fort – an iron age promontory fort in Co Kerry that is quite rapidly falling into the sea. Across the road from the now-closed fort is the Stone House Café. It once housed an audiovisual information centre/museum, a craft room, restaurant and café with bathroom facilities – a really well-equipped facility for visitors to Dunbeg.
Dunbeg Fort, Dingle peninsula, Co Kerry. Image: Jim Linwood/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0 DEED)
It also has a substantial carpark, enough space for maybe 30 cars. While carparks don’t usually inspire me, this one did as it represented the vibrancy and activity that visitors to Dunbeg fort once brought to the area. It was at that moment that the interconnectedness of daily life and heritage on the Dingle peninsula became apparent and that the loss of Dunbeg was not only a national-scale loss of information but something that would be felt so much more acutely along this peninsula. Parking at the Stone House distilled the loss of Dunbeg fort from part of a global problem to a very real and multifaceted local issue. That led me to explore the impact of heritage loss on communities and whether it could be an instigator for greater climate literacy and even climate action.
I have worked with coastal communities across western Europe (Ireland, Scotland and Denmark) whose local heritage is currently impacted by climate change. Each area has been, and will continue to be, altered by climate change, impacting on their lives and livelihoods, their sense of place and belonging, their perception of climate change, and overall, impacting their cultural identities and way of life. Rather than that be where the research ends, it is the beginning to then explore how climate action can be generated within these communities.
In your opinion, why is your research important?
I feel quite strongly that climate action is not a task to fall to future generations. It is clear that decisions relating to climate change taken now will have long-term consequences on sustainable mitigation, the global environment including sea-level change, as well as the future availability and costs of recourse. As such, in my work with communities, climate change and the need for climate action is not framed as a future problem, it is framed as a now problem.
Climate change is the biggest risk to heritage on the Atlantic and North Sea coasts of Europe. Since 2016, the coastal areas of Europe have witnessed the complete loss of a number of historic sites due to weather extremes associated with climate change. Broadly speaking, Western Europe is facing warmer, wetter winters; warmer, drier summers; an increase in the severity and incidence of extreme weather events including cyclones; and sea-level rise. Therefore, we know that coastlines are eroding, we know that built structures such as castles are impacted by the increase in rainfall and high winds, and we know our cultural landscapes are experiencing biodiversity loss. What we understand far less is the impacts of these losses and changes upon the associated communities?
What are some of the biggest challenges or misconceptions you face as a researcher in your field?
We all know the challenges of working in academia – the extremely competitive funding schemes, the attack on the arts and humanities happening to our colleagues in the UK, precarity for early career researchers, devaluation of higher education, and so on. What is less talked about are the challenges faced as a working mother. The academy was not established with working parents in mind. Even setting aside the high childcare costs in Ireland, the mental load of organising childcare, or the guilt of working, it is the perception that I – and other mothers – are less committed, enthusiastic or dependable than our childfree or male colleagues. When in reality, we are simply academics who happen to be parents.
‘The academy was not established with working parents in mind’
What is frustrating about this is we working mothers know how much better we are in the workplace due to the very fact we are parents. The skillset required to be a parent means we are more adaptable, flexible and resilient in the workplace – and don’t even start me on our problem solving skills.
There is a misconception about archaeologists and that is that we all dig. Archaeology is the study of material culture and many of us study and reevaluate the material previously excavated, in museums or private collections for example, while some of us analyse material in labs or in my case, examine the material preserved above ground in the form of historic buildings. Excavation is destructive so there are ethical issues to consider in the research process.
Do you think public engagement with science and data has changed in recent years?
My research centres strong involvement from the local communities, and this is in part because we’re dealing with their local heritage so interest tends to be high. Furthermore, we utilise citizen science methodologies which means working alongside the community members as partners. In order for this to work, there is considerable effort placed on building strong connections with the public.
Over the past few years, engagement has fluctuated due to Covid-19 amongst other things. A positive from this is the increase in hybrid engagement. For far too long, we relied solely on face-to-face engagement with communities. This is a great way to engage with people but overlooks those with mobility issues, be it physical or financial, care roles and so on. We can build stronger connections with the public by utilising hybridity and online connectivity rather than returning to how it was prior to Covid.
These connections are a crucial part in combatting the distrust in experts and misinformation that we’ve seen increase in recent years. Anthropogenic climate change is unfortunately one of those topics which is not universally accepted. Through my citizen science approach to research, we’ve created mutually beneficial engagement with communities, that is both resilient and genuine. This has allowed the community members to research their own heritage-at-risk or heritage loss, and locally contextualised climate change. This combination of self-learning and peer-learning has been crucial for the research, but it has the subsequent impact of increasing trust in experts and so climate literacy.
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