Call for Papers

Stream organiser: Lucy A. Sames

London Conference in Critical Thought 
Friday 28th and Saturday 29th June 2024, University of Greenwich, London, UK 
Deadline for proposals: Thursday 29th February 2024

About: 

This stream explores feminist, queer and posthuman approaches to thinking about water – as materiality, metaphor and methodology – foregrounding the contingent nature and disruptive qualities of the liquid for creative practice.

As detailed by gender studies scholar Margrit Shildrick (1997), fluidity and leakiness are misogynist tropes that have historically been used to denigrate othered bodies through the portrayal of their biologies as watery, leaky and uncontainable. Such a characterisation thus excludes them from rational discourse that demands a stable and consistent conception of the self. Rather, in this stream, we will consider these qualities as vital, generative and liberatory: ‘water gives us material evidence of an alternative mode of being’ that seeks to problematize hierarchical binary logic (Chandler and Neimanis, 2013). 

This stream welcomes a wide range of submissions, that consider water and liquidity as/through the body, hydro/ecological perspectives on visual culture, marine vision, and watery speculations of all kinds. Formats can include academic presentations, workshops and roundtables to more creative and experimental formats such as performance, film, and publishing. 

Themes might include, but are not limited to: 

• Thinking with sea life, marine mammals and seaweeds;

• Swimming and diving as methods;

• Overflowing, gushing, flooding, and watery excess as disruptive methods;

• Floating and drifting as methods;

• Liquidity as a state of being or doing;

• Liquidity and queerness;

• Bodies of water – geographic, hydrologic, meteorologic, embodied, transcorporeal.

Suggested reading, a non-exhaustive list

Chen, Cecilia, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis (eds.) (2013). Thinking with Water, McGill-Queen’s Press.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline (2020) Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Chiko, CA: AK Press.

Jue, Melody (2020), Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Neimanis, Astrida (2012) ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’ in Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice, 96–115.

Shildrick, Margrit (1997) Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics. London, UK: Routledge.

Info: 

Please send a 250 word abstract for a proposed presentation to londoncritical@gmail.com wit h ‘Watery Speculations’ in the subject line. 
Website: https://www.londoncritical.co.uk/ Twitter: @londoncritical
Deadline: Thursday 29th February 2024. 
Please note that LCCT is an in-person conference.