This panel invites papers that engage with water as a central element in (not exclusively!) contemporary literature and film, drawing on the framework of the Blue Humanities. We seek contributions that explore water not merely as setting or metaphor, but as dynamic matter, multispecies habitat, and relational space. As Serpil Opperman argues, the Blue Humanities foreground the fluid, connective, and transformative qualities of water, enabling a rethinking of ecological subjectivity beyond anthropocentric and land-based paradigms.

In literature and film, oceans, rivers, wetlands, and submerged environments often become sites where boundaries blur—between bodies and ecologies, myth and memory, species and selves. Texts and films such as Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water, or Craig Santos Perez’s and Alice Oswald’s poetry (to only name a few prominent examples) investigate how water shapes experience, survival, and resistance.

We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that consider how narrative form, visuality, and sound interact with the materiality and affective dimensions of water. How do stories of water challenge terrestrial-centric epistemologies? In what ways do literary and cinematic representations of aquatic life, rising seas, or fluid bodies offer alternative imaginaries of care, kinship, and cohabitation?

Topics may include (for example): amphibian and hybrid figures; hydrofeminism; aquatic folklore and water deities; the sensory and sonic registers of water; colonial and extractivist histories of waterways; speculative visions of water futures.

Please upload your proposal (~300 words) for the presentation of your paper (20 minutes and additional 10 minutes for discussion) under the URL provided.