For a full description: https://marinesciencestudies.co.uk/call-for-papers/
Our colleagues, Elis Jones, Jose A. Cañada, and Sabina Leonelli, are guest editing a topical collection, “Values at Sea: Marine Science Studies Meets Blue Humanities,” for the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences.
According to them: If you are interested in contributing to this Topical Collection, please send an abstract proposal (300 words) and brief biographical sketch (300 words) to Elis Jones (erj205 [at] exeter.ac.uk) by the 30th of June 2023. Guest editors will inform about abstract acceptance in Mid-July and invite authors to submit a full paper by 1st of December 2023.
It is our great pleasure to announce our upcoming event, hosted by The Eco- and Bioart Lab and The Posthumanities Hub, and generously supported by The Seed Box and Åke Wiberg Foundation:
End of the Sea? Art and Science for Multispecies Futures Workshop takes place on 13th December 2021 at 13:15 – 17:00 – on Zoom!
For registration details – see below.
As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans and seas stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable multitudes of creatures at a deep-time scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that marine environments are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future human and nonhuman communities. This matters to us, too. Climate change, environmental destruction and diminishing biological diversity form the key pillars of the present more-than-human crisis of planetary proportions. This calls for our attention and for responses from the more-than-human humanities.
Still, a lot remains unknown at the levels of oceanic shallow waters, its depths and along coastlines. Western cultural imaginaries picture the ocean and the sea as those which wash away, neutralise, conceal and hide in their limitless volume ‘under the surface.’ The ocean and the sea are culturally marked as the spaces of ‘forgetting’: out of sight, out of mind.
‘End of the Sea? Art and Science for Multispecies Futures’ workshop, hosted by The Eco- and Bioart Lab and The Posthumanities Hub, aims to bring together artists, researchers, writers and other practitioners, who – through their critical and creative, inter- and transdisciplinary practices – explore the boundary areas of the coastline and the estuary, and their accompanying cultural and scientific meanings. The workshop will zoom in on the wrack zone – particularly in the context of the Baltic Sea – with its low-trophic communities of algae, mussels and other species not only as key actors in the polluted, warming waters of climate change, but also as catalysts for new co-creations, collaborations, creativities and environmental imaginaries. What happens at (before? after?) the end of the sea? How can humans be a more caring and attentive ecological force for multispecies futures by the edge of the sea? Join us on 13th December to find out!
The workshop has been generously supported by The Seed Box and Åke Wiberg Foundation (for ‘Havshumaniora’).
The Eco- and Bioart Lab connects artists, artistic researchers and other practitioners, as well as doctoral students whose practice and research focus on art and the environment in their broadest understanding. EBL opens up a transdisciplinary space, where artistic practice converges with philosophy, cultural theory, art studies, visual culture, queer death studies and posthumanities in synergy and as equally legitimate voices.
The Posthumanities Hub is a research group and a multi-university platform for postdisciplinary and more-than-human humanities, for philosophy, arts and sciences informed by advanced cultural critique and creativity. In our research, we specialise in the more-than-human condition and inventive feminist materialist approaches to it. We work to meet up with pressing societal challenges, across the natureculture divide and target specific cases. Curiously, creatively and critically.
The event is co-curated by Dr Marietta Radomska and Prof. Cecilia Åsberg.
In order to take part in the event, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 10th December 2021 at noon (CET) the latest.
The Zoom links will be sent to you on 12th December in the evening.
Welcome to this open digital conference at KTH where water is at the centre.
If you are hungry for oceanic humanities tune in to Cecilia Åsberg’s speed talk in session C, where new and unconventional approaches to how to think, work with, make use of, and take care of our most precious resource are explored.
The conference will look at advances in science and technology that helps us manage water – our most precious resource – sustainably now and in the future. We also discuss the role of universities for collaborative knowledge production, in water as well as in other areas. What is needed of us to make collaboration meaningful? In three parallel speed talk sessions, we learn about new discoveries and research across all disciplines.
Program 09.00-09.20 Welcome and Introduction 09.20-10.00 Keynote lecture: Prof. Dr. Janet Hering, Director of Eawag 10.00-10.15 Break 10.15-11.00 Parallel speed talk sessions: Session A: Transforming water infrastructure Session B: Healthy, safe and inclusive Session C: New horizons for water 11.00-11.15 Break 11.15-12.00 Panel discussion on the role of universities
Submerged sustainability at the sea edge with ocean literacy and blue humanities across art and science
The United Nations has proclaimed a Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-2030 to support efforts to reverse the cycle of decline in ocean health and gather ocean stakeholders worldwide behind a common framework that will ensure ocean science can fully support countries in creating improved conditions for sustainable development of the Ocean.
Today, 8 June 2020, a start on this decade, stand out as the world oceans day! At the Posthumanities Hub we celebrate this day with a short description of our research on ocean literacy, blue and oceanic humanities, and low trophic mariculture across art and science.
All through the extended history of Earth, the coast line has been a zone of unrest where waves and tides have forged life and land on this planet. Oceanic algae, once terraforming Earth into a breathable planet, still produces most of our oxygen. The edge of the sea remains a strange and beautiful place, as Rachel Carson remarked with all its wondrous creatures in mind (1955/1998, The Edge of the Sea). Low-trophic marine zones, with kelp and other macro-algae (seaweeds), oysters, mussels and sea urchins, provide a host of benefits to various organisms, humans included, in providing many species with sanctuary and mitigating the eutrophication of the sea. Comparing this zone to the forests, Charles Darwin (1839, Voyages) observed on the sheer “number of living creatures of all Orders whose existence intimately depends on kelp”, and warned of the insurmountable effects should it perish (Filbee-Dexter et al. 2016, Filbee-Dexter and Wernberg 2018). Today, kelp forests and mussel beds are receding with the warming waters of climate change. They seem to in fact slowly perish however nutritious and beneficial they are for many species, including humans (Aksnes et al 2017). In dire times of environmental degradation, ocean acidification, and climate change, it is about time we turn our attention and appreciation to such low-trophic creatures and to the tidal zone of mariculture, as in this postdisciplinary arts and humanities project, submerged.
Sea Change at a glance
Sea Change is a postdisciplinary knowledge and capacity-building project on the potential of coastal mariculture aiming to connect marine sciences, natural history, cultural heritage and sustainability engineering with arts and environmental humanities research. The overall goal is to deepen ecological understanding and culturally contextualize scientific insight in eco-feminist theory, posthumanities and coastal communities so to stimulate society’s cultural imagination and invite a sea change of ethical responses to the state of sea life. In order to catalyse such change, this project will examine and unlock the transformational potential of eating, socializing and thinking with low tropic sea life and mariculture initiatives.
This project is a collaboration with KTH sustainability scientists, spatial practioners Cooking Sections, and Bonniers Konsthall. It involves the following researchers from The Posthumanities Hub: Cecilia Åsberg, Caroline Elgh Klingborg, Janna Holmstedt, and Marietta Radomska, and acknowledge the edible inspiration of the Lofoten International Art Festival 2019 and its Kelp Congress.
An edible and yummy bladderwrack from the shores of Lofoten, Norway. Photo: Cecilia Åsberg
