Deadline: November 15th, 2024
Contact: Christine Xiong, Ph.D. Candidate in English, Stanford University
Email: ccxiong@stanford.edu

Panel CFP for ASLE 2025: Collective Atmospheres, July 8-11 2025, University of Maryland, College Park

Water, as a shared and finite resource, both reflects and changes the relations of power that govern its uses, distributions, and representations. As the material consequences of water mismanagement continue to manifest—ranging from deep-sea mining to the severe water insecurity that disproportionately affects communities of colour—contestations over water that occur in “imaginative geographies” (Edward Said) and speculative environments may bring those uneven power relations and their latent racializing logics into relief. Attending to both water as matter and water as media, this panel pursues their interrelation through how they inflect, document, speculate upon, represent, and constitute processes of racialization. Guided by the productive tensions and potential synergies between ethnic studies and new trends in ecocriticism, this panel asks the following questions: what discursive and embodied theories of racialization are made visible through “imagined” and imaginative geographies of water? How do such reimaginings generate new spatial, temporal, and relational ethos that might alternatively historicize our present, or open other visions of the future? What methodologies and archival practices are necessitated by “reading water,” and how might such transdisciplinary interpretive modes redefine the ways in which imagined waters enable—or disable—the possibility of collective dwelling in our “liquid modernity” (Bauman)?

Drawing from ecomedia studies, critical ocean studies/oceanic humanities, and ethnic studies, this panel welcomes proposals from any discipline in relation (but not limited) to the following: hydrocolonialism/hydro-power, water management and stewardship, Indigenous and non-Western water epistemologies, megadams and other hydroelectric infrastructures, alternative maritime histories and modernities, oceanic and littoral ecomedia, science fiction and speculative fiction.

This is a guaranteed panel. Please send 300-word abstracts to ccxiong@stanford.edu by Friday, November 15th. Inquiries welcome.

Posted on October 14, 2024