Call for Papers Sea Mediations: Hydro-criticism and Tidal Thinking
Date: 30-31 May 2024
Location: University of Amsterdam
For: RMa students, PhD candidates, academic staff
Organisers: RMeS, NICA, & ASCA
Registration: Please visit https://www.nica-institute.com/events/sea-mediations-hydro-criticism-and-tidal-thinking-symposium/
We are pleased to invite RMa students, PhD candidates, and academic staff to submit abstracts for the symposium ‘Sea Mediations: Hydro-criticism and Tidal Thinking’, scheduled to take place on 30-31 May 2024 at the University of Amsterdam. This symposium will feature insightful presentations, discussions, and networking opportunities, with a distinguished lineup of four keynote speakers who are experts in the field of Elemental Media.
Theme:
Over the past decade, as part of a larger tendency in humanities, media studies has become ‘elemental’, i.e. the field has become attuned to its constituent parts, especially to the substances and substrates that compose media (Starosielski 2019). Media technologies, their materiality, hardware, and energy are connected with geophysical nature: nature affords and bears the weight of media culture. In the field of elemental media studies, different scholars have critically engaged with such issues to urge us to rethink what media and mediations exactly are. Much of the research in elemental media studies is oriented by the periodic or the Greek elements, while others contest this Eurocentric focus and have for instance added wood and metal, elements of Chinese philosophy and to point to the legacies of colonialism and the dangers of neo-colonialism. While addressing these more general problems and questions related to the elemental turn in the humanities, this symposium focuses in particular on the element of water. So as part of so-called ocean humanities, blue humanities or hydro feminism, the symposium brings together some of the most prominent scholars who engage with and hydro-criticism and different dimensions of sea mediations, and oceanic or tidal thinking. Our keynote speakers each are pioneers and experts in this rapidly growing (overflowing) field of media studies in the humanities.
Submission areas:
Participants are invited to think along the axes of six different panels around topics such as:
- Watery infrastructures and politics
- Liquid de-colonization
- Global blue feminism
- Hydro-imaginaries: aesthetics and ethics
- Flooded cities
- Arid aquatics (no more water).
Keynote speakers:
Melody Jue
Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, located on the unceded waters and lands of the Chumash people. Her research and writings center the ocean humanities, science fiction, media studies, science & technology studies, and the environmental humanities. Jue is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science Book Prize, and drew on humanities fieldwork as a scuba diver. She is also the co-editor of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke University Press, 2021) with Rafico Ruiz. She regularly collaborates with ocean scientists and artists, from fieldwork to collaborative writings and other projects.
Mekhala Dave
Mekhala Dave is an ocean law and policy analyst/researcher at TBA21 and PhD researcher at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, She is the organizer of the program about the Deep Sea called Culturing the Deep Sea, and an exhibition at Ocea Space, Venice, 2024. In collaboration with artist collaborator Emma Critchley, she presented Meet the Deep Sea: Should we Mine the Seabed? Mekhala Dave was at the deep sea mining UN negotiations in Jamaica in 2023, to speak on behalf of the population that is against this new form of exploitation.
Nicole Starosielski
Online talk
Nicole Starosielski’s research focuses on the global distribution of digital media, and the relationship between technology, society, and the aquatic environment. Her book, The Undersea Network, examines the cultural and environmental dimensions of transoceanic cable systems, beginning with the telegraph cables that formed the first global communications network and extending to the fiber-optic infrastructure that carries almost international Internet traffic. Starosielski has published essays on how Fiji’s video stores serve as a nexus of digital media access (Media Fields Journal), on Guam’s critical role in transpacific digital exchange (Amerasia), on the cultural imbrications of cable systems in Hawaii and California (Journal of Visual Culture), and photo essays on undersea cables (Octopus and Media-N). Before coming to NYU, she taught at Miami University of Ohio.
Yuriko Furuhata
Yuriko Furuhata is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies, an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies, and a core faculty member of the World Cinemas Program at McGill University in Tiohtiá:ke, now known as Montréal, situated on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Her book Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Duke University Press, 2022) traces the technological, institutional, and geopolitical connections between Japan and the United States that led to the historical development of artificial fog, weather control, networked computing, cybernetic environments, and metabolic architecture in the 20th century. She is currently working on a new book project, titled The Edges of Deep Time: Archipelagic Archives of the Anthropocene, explores the visual grammar of “deep time” through scientific atlases, photographs, films, and classifications of fossils, clouds, snow, and coral reefs in relation to the settler colonial histories of geosciences in Japan, the Pacific, and North America.
Important Dates:
Submission Deadline: 1 April 2024, 6pm (CET)
Notification of Acceptance: 15 April
Symposium: 30-31 May
Submission Guidelines:
Please provide the title of the presentation, an abstract (max. 200 words), name(s) of author(s), affiliation(s), and email address(es).
- Abstracts should be written in English.
- Ensure that the abstract aligns with the overall symposium theme
Number of ECTS: 2 ECTS
The workload includes: presence during the symposium, reading of assigned articles, preparing questions for the keynote speakers, writing of your paper, and a presentation during the symposium.
Review Process:
All submissions will be subjected to a review process by the organisers. The evaluation criteria include originality, fit with the theme(s) of the symposium, significance of contribution, and clarity of presentation. Since there is a limited number of seats, PhD candidates and RMA students are prioritised.
