Routinings at the Water’s Edge: Creative Access and Relational Method in Blue-Urban Fieldwork

Access in disability-informed fieldwork is not a static environmental feature nor a procedural guarantee. It emerges through creative, messy, uneven, and often invisible practices shaped by place, body, materiality, and relation. In this short communication, I introduce the concept of routinings: situated, affective, and more-than-human practices through which participation is enacted – and sometimes withdrawn - in blue space fieldwork with disabled people.
Drawing on creative relational methods and sensory-ethnographic encounters in tidal coastal environments with visually impaired participants, I explore micro-affordances such as co-timed immersion, dressing routines, and momentary refusals. These routinings are not background logistics; they are politically charged, emotionally saturated, and shaped by environmental volatility, institutional expectations, and embodied precarity. I conceptualise routinings as a creative methodological infrastructure - provisional and recursive, rather than fixed or replicable.
This contribution speaks to ongoing debates about how place mediates health equity, inclusion, and relational ethics. By centring the co-production of access in watery, affective, and atmospheric terms, I offer a framework for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to reimagine access not as a deliverable, but as an unfolding, accountable process: material, relational, and unfinished - a form of creative spatial negotiation that troubles the boundaries of urban geography and participatory research.

Selected for publication in the RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group’s 2025 Postgraduate Writing Competition. This paper introduces the concept of ‘routinings’ as situated, relational, and material practices through which access is enacted in blue space fieldwork with disabled participants. It contributes to debates on inclusive methodologies, health equity, and the politics of access.