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Dee Holt is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD in Fine Art that explores photography as a form of ecological witnessing and environmental activism. Situated within the Blue Humanities, the research examines how photography can move beyond representation to actively engage with polluted coastal and marine environments.

Central to the PhD is the concept of dissonant witnessing: an approach that holds together beauty and contamination, inviting viewers to confront the uneasy coexistence of leisure, infrastructure, and environmental harm along the British coastline. Rather than depicting crisis as spectacle, the work encourages sustained attention, ethical discomfort, and response-ability.

Dee’s research is grounded in analogue and experimental photographic processes, including cyanotype and darkroom practices using seawater, salt, and site-specific materials. These methods embed the environment directly into the photographic object, treating the sea as collaborator rather than subject.

Community engagement is a key element of the research. Through participatory workshops and collective image-making, photography becomes a shared tool for environmental noticing, dialogue, and action. Informed by posthuman and feminist theory, the PhD positions photography as both material practice and activist assemblage—capable of reconfiguring how environmental harm is seen, felt, and collectively addressed.