ABSTRACT
In this short conclusion, we draw together some common ideas from the preceding sections and tease out recurrent themes that collectively set an agenda for ongoing work on water, health and place. The individual chapters very effectively illustrate why interdisciplinary approaches, experiential accounts and an ongoing concern with equity and justice matter for health in the context of watery places and spaces. In framing this book more broadly as an exploration of hydrophilia, we will briefly revisit those themes and additionally consider critical questions of data and method, theory and hybrid health and wellbeing outcomes that we feel can better uncover the character of healthy blue-space connections. All of us live near water, in Dublin, Auckland, Bonn and Cornwall, respectively. These locations lead us to understand the differences between inland/coastal, cold/warm, empty/crowded and urban/rural waters and how each shapes the phenomenological, affective and material elements of those connections. There is an emergent sensibility, linked to wider critical global concerns, that requires us to also consider some of the assumptions, even privileges that come with those connections, as well as a potential introspection associated with green and blue space research. Such critical concerns with aspects of neoliberalism, inequality, biopolitics, resilience and care inform new writing by critical health geographers (Brown et al., 2009, 2017; Crooks et al., 2018), as well as from wider cross-disciplinary collections within which medical humanities, creativity and hydro-citizenship play significant roles (Atkinson and Hunt, 2019; Brown and Peters, 2018; Finlay, et. al., 2015; Roberts and Phillips, 2018). All this new research explores interconnectedness and blue ecologies that emerge in complex and often contradictory ways from individual, communal and global lives and settings.
