[Commlist] CFP Living With Water

Please find pasted below and attached in the Google link a call for 
papers for an online seminar series 2025 entitled "Living With Water:
Agency, Materiality, Narratives"

The deadline for abstracts is Monday 16 December 2024 and we are open to 
all disciplines and scholars at every career stage.

Please contact Sam Grinsell and Giulia Champion via (s.grinsell /at/ ucl.ac.uk) 
and (g.champion /at/ soton.ac.uk) for any questions.

CFP Poster: 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tf_X65WFRHbuZpUCdqhpC2X1rj5ukDNI/view?usp=sharing

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Living With Water: Agency, Materiality, Narratives
Online seminar series 2025

Water is essential to life. Its management, through everything from clay 
vessels to elaborate stone dams, is thus a key part of any human 
environment. Recently water has seeped, flooded and flowed into academic 
thought in astonishingly diverse ways. Historians, geographers, 
anthropologists, philosophers and others have examined human relations 
to it, the multiple ways of defining it, and how it underpins human and 
more-than-human ways of living and being. In the hands of some scholars, 
it has gone beyond being a subject of research to become a way of 
thinking, a material through which our understandings of the world can 
be rewritten. Astrida Neimanis has pointed out that we are all Bodies of 
Water (2017); Rachel Armstrong (2019) has explored the fluidity of 
matter itself; Karin Amimoto Ingersoll (2016) has (de-)constructed 
oceanic epistemologies. These multiple watery turns have come together 
under a number of labels including the Blue Humanities (Gillis 2013), 
Critical Ocean Studies (DeLoughrey 2019), and the Hydrohumanities (De 
Wolff, Faletti, López-Calvo 2021).
In May 2025 Sam Grinsell (University College London) and Giulia Champion 
(University of Southampton) will organise a series of online sessions to 
discuss new research in water, seeking to establish new connections and 
deepen existing collaborations. This series emerges from Grinsell’s 
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and follows-on from the Watery 
Habitations Roundtable held at the European Society of Environmental 
History Conference in Bristol in 2022.
We invite 15-minute presentations on the following themes (or related 
areas):

-	How does water act in the world? What kinds of relations emerge when 
we follow the water in our research?
-	How do the material properties of water (including ice and steam and 
how it moves between states) shape environments, cultures and places?
-	How do representations of and narratives about water shape human 
concepts of the world? And who gets to write narratives of water from 
culture to legal standing and from economic valuation to artistic 
representations?
-	In what ways is water contested? How do power and resistance play out 
in control over water?
-	How can the commodification of water be unpacked and challenged in a 
time of neo-liberalism and climate crisis?
-	When is water agentic? And what epistemologies and ontologies grow 
with water rather than about it?

We are open to all disciplines and scholars at every career stage. 
Please send 500-word abstracts, plus a 200-word bio, to 
(s.grinsell /at/ ucl.ac.uk) or (g.champion /at/ soton.ac.uk) by Monday 16 December 
2024. We are also open to other formats such as whole panels, 
roundtables, book discussions etc, please submit proposals for these in 
the same way. Additionally, please include your timezone and a note on 
your availability in May 2025. We will bear these in mind when putting 
together the event programme; sessions will likely run on Fridays but we 
may have some flexibility.

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