[Commlist] CFP for two-day symposium - Water as Method: Space, Place & the Hydrological Gaze in Moving Images

*CFP: Water as Method: Space, Place & the Hydrological Gaze in Moving 
Images*

*Call for Submissions:
*/Water as Method: Space, Place & the Hydrological Gaze in Moving 
Images/ is a two-day symposium (19–20 June 2025) exploring the poetics 
and politics of water in contemporary artist moving image (AMI) 
practices and methods. The symposium reflects on innovative approaches 
in AMI that respond to the intersecting planetary crises of climate 
catastrophe and geopolitical conflict—through the lens of water.

Hosted by the Glasgow School of Art’s School of Fine Art in 
collaboration with FieldARTS, the research programme of the 
Infrastructure Humanities Group (University of Glasgow), the symposium 
invites contributions from artists, academics, early-career and 
postgraduate researchers, and creative practitioners. We welcome 
participants to join us in Glasgow to share watery poetics and 
approaches within moving image practice. This event and all submissions 
are free of charge.

*Submissions*

We invite proposals for a wide range of contributions including 
traditional academic papers, pre-constituted roundtables, and 
practice-led formats such as video essays, films, or moving image works. 
We welcome interdisciplinary submissions from scholars across (but not 
limited to): fine arts, visual cultures, Communications and Media 
Studies, curation, film studies, memory studies, environmental 
humanities, urban studies, cultural geography.


*Organisers:
*Kelly Rappleye (School of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art); FieldARTS 
research residency, Infrastructure Humanities Group (University of 
Glasgow); Struan Gray (Falmouth University)


*Context:
*Bringing together artists and scholars working with hydrocritical 
practices in the moving image, this symposium extends ongoing research 
into how /hydropoetics/ (Ryan, 2021) offers new methodological and 
epistemological frameworks for researching place. The presence of water 
in both urban landscapes and film operates as a material and poetic 
carrier of memory and history, capable of holding multiple and 
overlapping narratives and subjectivities. Urban waterways, river 
basins, coastal zones, port areas, and hydrological infrastructures 
reveal situated material, historical, cultural, and political conditions 
of the urban, demanding new creative and critical strategies of situated 
fieldwork.

Emerging dialogues in arts and humanities research—foregrounding 
/geologic/ (Litvintseva, 2022), /topological/ (Mansfield, 2016; 
Costantin, 2021), /infrastructural/ (Davies, 2024), /tidalectic/ 
(Brathwaite, 1994; DeLoughrey, 2020; Hessler, 2020), and /oceanic/ 
(Syperek & Wade, 2020) approaches—have increasingly shaped contemporary 
artistic practices. These practices often draw on postcolonial 
philosophy, decolonial feminist imaginaries, and ecocritical, 
hydrofeminist methods emerging from the /blue humanities/ (Hofmeyr & 
Lavery, 2022). This is reflected in a burgeoning field of AMI that 
deploys hydropoetics to interrogate urban coastlines, canals, and 
riverways. Such works frequently engage the archive to narrate submerged 
maritime histories of migration, extraction, and diaspora—revealing 
speculative watery archives and unseen infrastructures of climate 
colonialism embedded in urban waterscapes.

Water in urban environments produces spatial and temporal states of 
permeability, spectrality, stagnation, and decay, enabling reflections 
on the presence of multiple pasts and layered histories. Moving image 
representations of watery poetics in urban landscapes often enact forms 
of /multidirectional memory/ (Rothberg, 2009) and transnational 
place-memory, illuminating how traumatic legacies of colonialism, 
conflict, and displacement continue to structure the present.

Considering water as an /affective infrastructure/ (Bosworth, 2023) in 
moving image practice opens further questions around how hydropoetics 
represent, mediate, or narrativise affective relationships to water 
infrastructures—and how these shape processes of remembrance, 
memorialisation, and place-memory (Knox, 2017; Bosworth, 2023). As a 
method, hydropoetics may also disrupt the visual regimes and 
epistemologies of colonial modernity, subverting the logics of 
legibility and photographic representation that structure dominant 
Western traditions of history-telling (Quijano, 2000; Wynter, 2003; 
Gaztambide-Fernández, 2014).

*Possible topics include (but are not limited to):*

  * Liquid landscapes in film: spectrality, contested memory, and urban
    trauma
  * Hydrocritical approaches in moving image: reading for water,
    dockside reading, hydrocolonial infrastructures, spatial politics
  * Watery film techniques: ‘turbid media’, submerged filmmaking, wet
    ontologies
  * Weathering and affective atmospheres of place: damp, steam, cloud,
    ripple, mist, flood, rain, humidity, fog
  * Watery networks of care: transnational hydrofeminism, political
    activism, diasporic care
  * Hydro-imaginaries of place: rivers, canals, waterways, hydrocommons,
    hydrocitizenship
  * Decolonial approaches in AMI: submerged perspectives and place-based
    activism
  * Imperial toxicities: colonial seepage, sediment, toxic debris,
    poisoned ecologies
  * Hydrological infrastructures in film: dams, ports, estuaries, tidal
    zones, weirs, lagoons

*Presentation Formats:
*- Individual papers (15 minutes)
- Pre-constituted roundtables (30 minutes, 3–5 participants
- Video essays / moving image works (Up to 10 minutes screening, 
excerpted if longer, followed by 10 minutes of commentary/discussion by 
the creator)

*_Submission Guidelines:_*

Please send your proposal (and any queries) to: *(waterasmethod /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(waterasmethod /at/ gmail.com)>
Deadline: Monday, 12 May 2025, 5pm BST

*

_Your submission should include:_

 1. ***Title and format* of your contribution
 2. ***Summary* (150 words)
 3. ***Abstract* (300–500 words) outlining the focus and relevance of
    your submission
 4. ***Short biography* (150 words)
 5. ***Any relevant links or images* (e.g. film/ video submissions)


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