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This conference explores water’s role in simultaneously enforcing and connecting boundaries, as well as the idea of existing “in-between” spaces. Oceans, rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, and other waterways are used in literary and cultural texts as sites of transformation and transportation. As noted by scholars in the Blue Humanities and by those who trace water-logged post-human futures, water can facilitate both literal and metaphorical “passage” between places, identities, and existences. For example, oceanic spaces not only serve as backdrops to change, but also serve as a mode of transportation between continents. At the same time, water serves as a tool for enforcing political boundaries and creating distance, acting as one of humanity’s natural barriers. This conference aims to explore the liminality of water and/or the fluidity of being.

The English Graduate Student Association at Georgetown University seeks proposals from various disciplines and theoretical approaches addressing, but not limited to, the following questions: What is water’s role in enforcing and connecting boundaries? What can we learn from water’s many cultural forms? How does water’s perpetual shapelessness reflect the aqueous “in-betweenness” of the human experience? 

The conference welcomes an interdisciplinary dialogue inviting scholars in a range of fields including literary studies, film and media studies, history, philosophy, sociology, political science, postcolonial studies, trauma studies, environmental studies, critical race studies, diaspora studies, narrative studies, disability studies, narrative studies, and other related fields of study within the combined thematic, theoretical, and critical orientation provided by this call. 

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to: 

• “Bodies” of water and the physical nature of water; materiality, perpetual motion, shapelessness, ebb and flow 

• Transcontinental readings of the relationship between colonialism and the environment; chattel slavery, settler colonialism, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Middle Passage

• Engagement with ecocriticism/politics, environmental humanities, bioethics, and the sciences

• Blue Humanities, hydrocolonialism, hydrocriticism, blue space racism, media and infrastructure critique

• Ecological injustice; ecocide, displacement, toxification

• Transportation/travel narratives, ecopoetry, documentary

• Natural/Human-induced disasters; climate change, pollution, nuclear waste, the Anthropocene, conservation efforts

• Water-based speculative fiction/Sci-Fi, Cli-Fi

• Technology; the water footprint of AI, cost of production

• Mysticism and religion; purification, cleansing, fluid reality, ritual

• Migration narratives; water stress, fluid metaphors  

• Metaphors of drowning, swimming, floating

• Gender/fluidity; queer/trans relation to watery sites, metaphors of fluidity in women’s writing

• Aquatic animals, the posthuman/transhuman, the unexplored ocean 

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Abstracts between 150 and 300 words should be submitted to the attached Google Form. Please submit proposals by October 5, 2025. 

Approved abstracts will be informed by October 12, 2025. The conference will be held at Georgetown University on November 7, 2025.

Submit Here!