Oceanography & the Blue Humanities: Literary Geographies of Islands and Water Bodies

December 09-12, 2026 

Concept Note:

The convergence of the two distinct domains of studies, i.e., oceanography with the nascent field of the Blue Humanities to interrogate the literary geographies of islands and water bodies, opens a new gateway to the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. In the contemporary researches it is being witnessed what is termed as an “Oceanic Turn”, “Marine/Aquatic Turn” or “Blue Turn” in the humanities, wherefore the ocean, sea and other aqueous spaces are no longer treated merely as decors or metaphors but as agile, conducive sites of cultural, historical, and ecological as well as spiritual epitaph. Analyzing the concurrent synchronous and parallel shift in the field of the blue humanities and oceanography together, it is observed that oceanography has increasingly moved beyond positivist hydrography to interact with the various facets of human life associated with their aquatic bonhomie such as their social, political, and symbolic dimensions of marine and lacustrine systems. By synthesizing oceanographic data with literary and cultural analysis, this conference seeks to get the responses of such esoteric and labyrinth queries to map how islands, coastlines, and watery interiors become charged literary geographies that design anthropocentric and ecocentric worldviews with an ecoscimatic lens. Further it is also sought to discern the veracity that the deep-sea study with a thalassic focus and pelagic perspective paves a way where ingenuity coalesces the integration of seascapes and ecoscimatic imagination in literary criticism and geographical interventions simultaneously. 

The Blue Humanities emerge as an urgent answer to land-centric or terracentric human studies. This approach has often centered land as the primary stage for history, politics and identity. According to scholars like Serpil Oppermann, Steve Mentz, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, the ocean functions as a global medium that links disparate geographies, cultures, and temporalities. That understanding of the ocean — just an empty space between chunks of land, a marketplace for expanding human activity and commerce — sustains colonial, extractive and anthropocentric ways of knowing. In this environment, the Blue Humanities employs ecocriticism, environmental studies, maritime history and postcolonial theory to emphasize the ocean as a space for memory, movement, and connections among species.

At the same time, the field of literary geographies has focused on how texts shape space, especially through the frequent depiction of islands, archipelagos, and bodies of water. James Kneale, for example, argues that fictional islands serve as unique literary spaces of ownership, separation, and change. Here, imperial desires to understand, claim, and control intersect with dreams of solitude and personal reinvention. Other scholars have built on Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope to illustrate how islands and oceans influence narrative time, confinement, and growth. This project will build on these ideas by linking literary geographies of islands and water bodies with oceanographic models, creating a cross-disciplinary approach that connects the physical sciences and interpretive humanities.

This conference seeks to analyze the significant issues related to the gap between the scientific understanding of water bodies—rooted in hydrodynamics, thermohaline circulation, and ecological modeling—and the literary portrayal of oceans, seas, rivers, and islands as places of metaphor, memory, and myth. While oceanography increasingly acknowledges the interconnected nature of water environments, much of this complexity is missing from literary criticism. Literary criticism often views water as a purely symbolic or aesthetic element instead of a material force with differences. On the other hand, scholarship in the humanities can enhance oceanographic stories by highlighting the cultural, political, and ethical aspects of how water is mapped, described, and treated as a commodity. 

This intellectual gathering seeks to trace the history of literary depictions of islands and water bodies from classical and early modern texts to contemporary ocean literature, focusing on how spatial concepts like archipelago, littoral zone, and submarine depth are created in narratives and further to analyze how oceanographic discussions and data are shaped or hidden within literary representations of the sea, including shipping routes, climate change forecasts, and ocean acidification. 

This conference is also looking for having an outcome creating a theoretical framework for interpreting islands and water bodies as interconnected sites of material and meaning, drawing on critical ocean studies, Blue Humanities, and spatial literary studies and eventually, investigating the ethical and political consequences of combining oceanography and the Blue Humanities, particularly regarding the climate crisis, ocean governance, and Indigenous and postcolonial ways of knowing the ocean.

The 5th EFSLE International Conference (ICOBH 2026) aims to examine the interdisciplinary nexus of oceanography and the Blue Humanities vividly articulating the reimagining of water -not merely as a scientific object of study but as a cultural agent that shapes human experience, narrative, and value systems. Through literary geographies of islands and water bodies, scholars can uncover pluralistic epistemologies that integrate empirical data with embodied knowledge, ethical reflection, and imaginative representation.

Being a multidisciplinary and an interdisciplinary conference, original research papers from all the streams are most welcome to discuss such grave issues largely related, but not exclusively limited, to the following sub-themes:

Sub-themes:

Oceanography, Environmental Crises and Marine Systems

1. Deep-Sea Microbiomes, Climate Feedbacks and Oceanic Narrativity
2. Marine Socio‑Ecological Thresholds in Coastal Humanities
3. Oceanic Curating, Environmental Crises and Multispecies Publics/Assemblages
4. Future Oceans Adaptation, Justice and Narrative Modelling
5. Homo Aquaticus: Human–Ocean Co‑Habitation as Critical Utopia
6. Ocean Narratives of Environmental Crisis vis-à-vis Climate Change
7. Ecocriticism, Marine Ecology and Climate Change
8. Oceanic Holography and Environmental Monitoring 
9. Trans-disciplinary Water Ethics: An Integration of Ocean Acidification and Coral Bleaching
10. Environmental Racism, Climate Change and Coastal Vulnerability and Environmental Justice: An Ethical Discourse

Biocultural Continuities and the Inextricable Indigenous Marine Ethnoecology

1. Indigenous Knowledge Tradition (IKT), Sacred Landscapes and the Thalassophilic Bonhomie among the Tribes of the Islands
2. The Anthropology of Traditional Practices among the Onge, Shompen. Jarawa and Other Tribal Communities of Andaman & Nicobar Islands
3. Oral Traditions as Cultural Archives: Mapping Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in the Andaman and Nicobar Archipelago
4. Traditional Fishing Knowledge and Maritime Cultural Heritage among the Nicobarese and Other Island Communities
5. Ritual, Belief, and Biodiversity: A Study of Indigenous Cosmologies and Environmental Ethics in the Islands
6. Traditional Architecture and Environmental Wisdom in Indigenous Settlements of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands
7. Cultural Resilience and Environmental Change: Indigenous Responses to Ecological Disturbance in the Islands
8. Biocultural Responses to Climate and Habitat Change
9. An Ethnographic Study of Indigenous Healing Practices among the Tribal Communities of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands
10. Marine Ecology and Indigenous Biocultural Analysis with an Ethnolinguistics Approach

Oceanic Imaginaries and Literary Geographies

1. Explores Oceanic Symbolism, Memory, and Cultural Narratives
2. Intertidal Literatures and Coastal Transformations Arts and Cultural Studies
3. Maritime Isolation in Island Literatures: The Cultural Epistemologies
4. Maritime Imaginaries and Cultural Memory
5. Tsunami Echoes in Oral Epics
6. Andaman-Nicobar Tribal Sea Imaginaries: Oral Geographies of Waves Currents and Indigenous Seafaring Lore
7. Seascapes and Spatial Studies
8. Affective Geographies of Water
9. Underwater Worlds and Submarine Imaginations
10. Oceanic Epistemologies and the Contemporary Writings & Criticism

Benthic Ecology and Benthic Biology:

1. Benthic Infrastructures of Renewable Energy
2. Epistemic Bias and the “Unheeded” Benthic Data
3. Affective Life of the Deep Seafloor
4. Life Histories in the Dark: Biographies of least-known Benthic Species
5. Benthic Bodies as Geomorphic Agents
6. Microbial Benthos and the Ethics of Invisibility
7. Benthic Literatures and the Patchy Seascape Knowledge

Speculative and Pollution-Focused Literatures

1. Quantum Oceanography in Speculative Fiction
2. Ethics and Ocean Governance

2. Microplastic Poetics and Oceanic Waste: Literary Depictions of Plastic Pollution as Narrative Debris.
3. Hydrofeminist Readings of Ocean Currents: Gendered Flows in Climate Fiction.
4. Bioluminescent Imageries in Island Folklore – Glowing Seas as Symbols of other Worldliness.
5. Subduction Zone Mythologies – Tectonic Plate Collisions in Literary Geographies

Acoustic and Climate Oscillation

1. Acoustic Ecologies of Whale Songs – Soundscapes in Maritime Sound Studies

2. Oceanic Cryptids and Posthuman Hybrids – Mythic Sea Creatures and Cryptozoology
3. El Niño Narratives and Monsoon Literatures
4. Hydrocolonial Archives in Sunken Libraries – Lost Underwater Texts and Imperial Histories
5. Oceanic Mapping and Tribal Depth-Sounding Acoustics

Therapeutic and Microbial Writings

1. Thalassotherapy in Wellness Utopias: Sea-water Healing
2. Neutrino Detection Poetics
3. Mangrove Labyrinths and Tidal Mazes: Rhizomatic Geographies in Coastal Fiction
4. Islanders’ Folklores and Oceanic Eddies: The Indigenous Narratives
5. Mesopelagic Zone Anxieties

IKS: Investigating the intersections of Oceanographic inquiry and Blue Humanities discourse within the framework of Indian Knowledge Traditions

1. Physical Oceanography in Purāṇic Seven Oceans: Descriptions of Mythical Seas in Ancient Texts Reflecting Modern Salinity and Currents
2. Oceanic Currents and Monsoon Navigation: Referring to Kautilya's Arthaśāstra on Coastal Shipping and Wind Patterns
3. Vedic Plankton Knowledge and Biological Oceanography: Vājasaneyi-Samhitā - intricately articulating the Ocean Vegetation and Fauna
4. Vinaya Piṭaka and the Ancient Surveys of Underwater Topography, Abysses, and Continental Shelves in the Traditional Buddhist Bathymetry
5. Literary Landscapes and the Vedic Seven-Island Geography: The Sapta-Dvīpa Cosmology
6. The Jain Antecedents and the Purāṇic Tides: Myth and Maritime occurrence in  Āvaśyakasūtra

Important Dates:

• Registration Starts on: 15 March 2026
• Deadline for Submission of Abstracts: 15 August 2026
• Intimation of Acceptance: within 15 days after receiving the Abstract
• (If selected, the participants may proceed with registration afterwards)
• Full Paper Submission (first draft): 30 October 2026
• If the first draft is accepted after the review, the author will be given ample time to submit the final draft as this special volume will be a post-conference publication. 

Notes:

• Abstract of 300 words with 5 keywords must be mailed to- md@efsle.org
• Mention “ICOBH 2026” or “Andaman Conference” in the subject line.
• Abstracts can be submitted through the Google form as well using this link:

https://forms.gle/MrLTrbgax9mNJB1w7  

• Please use 12 point Times New Roman and avoid footnotes.
• The full paper must be within 6000-10000 words (excluding all the references and the abstract). Use the latest MLA style of referencing.
• Authors are requested to attach their bio-note (in third person, not exceeding 100 words) separately.

For Registration and More information - https://www.efsle.org/andaman-conference-2026/  Contact: 

Prof. G. Padmavati (Convenor)- Department of Ocean Studies and Marine Biology, Pondicherry University, Sri Vijaya Puram Campus, A&N Islands

Dr. Rishikesh Kumar Singh (Co-convenor)- President, EFSLE, New Delhi. Mob: 00-91-9205037771