Deadline: 12/1/22
Contact: Alison Maas, PhD Candidate, UC Davis
Email: abmaas@ucdavis.edu
Phone: 617.851.8332
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
We are seeking proposals for inclusion on the panel “Communicating Catastrophe in the Blue Commons.” In July 2022, the UN Ocean Conference issued the “Lisbon Declaration” entitled “Our ocean, our future, our responsibility” with its authors emphasizing that “restoring harmony with nature through a healthy, productive, sustainable and resilient ocean is critical for our planet, our lives and our future.” This exemplifies another step in a longer geopolitical trajectory initiated with the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) and its attempt to partition and demarcate a shared global oceanic space. Patricia Yaeger writes in the 2010 PMLA editor’s column “Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” a foundational text in establishing critical ocean studies, that “though we may wish to regard the oceans and seas as a commons, a collectively owned space serving interlocking sets of national and international interests, ordinary folks have little say about maritime preservation or management” (525). The “Lisbon Declaration” seemingly marks a shift away from this and towards a collective voice when it comes to the future of the oceans, a planetary “our.” Where Yaeger asks what stakes arise in thinking about shared environments in reading literature, this panel takes these stakes into the contemporary context to ask how concepts and imaginaries of shared aquatic spaces might speak to an ocean in the midst of climate catastrophe. Further, through our organizing notion of “communicating catastrophe in the blue commons,” this panel also seeks to not only interrogate how the emergency the Earth’s ocean faces is being represented, but also how this is communicated to a global public, how a “blue commons” can be a vital component of restoring planetary health, and how the sometimes problematic conceiving of “commons” might also counter or undermine this driving motive to save our seas.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
-Ocean politics and policy (local, global, and/or planetary)
-Environmental activist movements (including performance, literature, film etc.)
-Abolition, resistance, revolution at sea
-Pacific studies, literatures and geopolitics of Oceania
-Nonprofits and Ocean Conservation campaigns
-Public Humanities (in relation to the hard sciences, marine sciences, other disciplines, and/or stand alone)
-Pedagogy and teaching the oceans
-Communicating with nonhuman creatures and/or advocating for nonhuman creatures
-Indigenous rights in/to the blue commons
-Media studies/ Deep-sea cables/ Ocean as Medium
-Borderlands and Border Ecologies
-Resource Extractivism (where hidden or hyper-visualized)
-Posthumanism
-Visualizing and communicating the planetary ocean– ocean currents, wind patterns, weather phenomena, hurricanes, tsunamis, cyclones, etc.
Please send abstracts of 300 words and a short bio to abmaas@ucdavis.edu and gwhegarty@ucdavis.edu by December 1, 2022.
Posted on September 28, 2022
