Sadie Rockliffe

Sadie Rockliffe is an ESRC SCDTP-funded PhD student researching the lived experiences of visually impaired (VI) individuals in blue spaces, with a focus on wellbeing, interdependence, and accessibility. Her work is informed by therapeutic landscape research, critical disability studies, and blue space geographies, examining how people with VI engage with aquatic environments beyond ocularcentric assumptions.

Sadie’s PhD will explore how VI individuals navigate and experience blue spaces, particularly within the social practice of outdoor swimming. While blue spaces are increasingly recognised for their therapeutic potential, they are also shaped by systemic exclusions, inaccessible infrastructures, and normative assumptions about ability, movement, and perception. This research highlights how water’s materiality—its movement, unpredictability, and sensory affordances—creates distinct embodied experiences, often overlooked in mainstream accessibility discourse.

The project is guided by participant-led inquiry, amplifying VI perspectives on blue space engagement. Rather than assuming all VI individuals interact with water in the same way, the research recognises diverse lived realities, shifting sensory capacities, and temporal experiences of sight loss. By centering sociomateriality, interdependence, and fluid accessibility frameworks, this study aims to rethink inclusion beyond static, infrastructure-based models, contributing to a more dynamic, participant-driven understanding of blue space access.

Before arriving at the University of Brighton, Sadie spent over 20 years working with governing bodies and local communities to build inclusive accessible events and destination management strategies.

Sadie is currently an HPL on a range of level 4 to 7 undergraduate and postgraduate modules, including Critical Perspectives in Tourism, Global Issues in Travel and Tourism, Resort and Destination Management, Special Interest and Niche Tourism, Organisational Behaviour and HRM, and Managing and Developing People.