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.

In addition to her HPL teaching across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, Sadie Rockliffe is actively involved in knowledge exchange through her research on inclusive access to blue spaces. She co-designed and delivered a public-facing, research-informed VI Swim and Wellbeing Session, which gained national media attention and contributed to wider public discourse on disability and access. She regularly engages with community partners, media outlets, and advocacy organisations to promote inclusive aquatic environments and co-produced research practices. 

Sadie Rockliffe is the elected Postgraduate Research (PGR) Representative for the School of Business and Law and the wider University of Brighton Doctoral College. In these roles, she represents PGR voices across disciplines, contributes to university-wide researcher development initiatives, and works to enhance communication, support, and inclusivity across the doctoral researcher community. As part of this representative role, she participates in the University of Brighton Doctoral College Board, contributing to discussions on postgraduate research policy and strategy. She also serves as the PGR Representative for the University of Brighton’s Tourism, Inclusion, Events and Society (TIES) Research Excellence Group, supporting the integration of doctoral perspectives within research-led communities. Sadie is also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and a committee member of the International Working Group Port Cities & Coastal Communities within the COST Action Rethinking the Blue Economy (RethinkBlue). She is also co-lead for the new South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership Special Interest Group on Trauma in Research (TiR SIG), which brings together doctoral researchers and supervisors to critically explore the emotional, embodied, and ethical dimensions of trauma-related research and researcher wellbeing.