CFP — Edited Volume
Watery Worlds: Decolonial Ecologies and the Mediterranean

This edited volume explores water as a decolonial, ecological, and affective force across Mediterranean geographies, including but not limited to contemporary Turkey. Rather than treating water as background or metaphor, the volume considers it a central analytic force shaping experiences of colonialism, displacement, border-making, memory, and belonging.

The Mediterranean—long imagined as a crossroads of empire, migration, and ecological precarity—offers a distinctive arena for examining how water structures both lived environments and imaginative worlds. This edited book seeks to highlight how fiction, nonfiction, short story, poetry, and other narrative forms articulate shifting relationships between the human and nonhuman, land and sea, the natural and the supernatural. Contributors are invited to interrogate how watery environments produce their own ways of knowing, remembering, dwelling, and resisting.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Decolonial and postcolonial approaches to Mediterranean waterscapes
• Human/nonhuman entanglements, multispecies relations, and coastal ecologies
• Literary engagements with drought, pollution, rising seas, and climate change
• Water as archive, witness, medium, or threshold
• Migration, exile, and the unstable borders between land and sea
• Ecopoetics, narrative theory, and the aesthetics of aquatic forms
• Indigenous, local, and community-based water knowledges
• Gendered, queer, or feminist approaches to water
• Mythic, mystical, or supernatural waters
• Comparative and transregional perspectives (Aegean–Mediterranean, Levant–Turkey, North Africa–Mediterranean, Black Sea–Mediterranean)

About the Volume

Watery Worlds positions the Mediterranean as an environment where ecological volatility, colonial history, and decolonial futures intersect. By placing literary and cultural texts in dialogue with environmental humanities and blue humanities frameworks, the volume aims to illuminate the world-making capacities of water—how its flows, depths, and absences shape modes of belonging and unbelonging, practices of remembrance, and evolving imaginaries of place.

The volume is intended for publication in Bloomsbury’s New Directions in Blue Humanities series and is aimed at scholars working in environmental humanities, world literature, decolonial studies, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean studies, ecocriticism, border studies, and water studies. 

Submission Guidelines

Abstract: 300–400 words
Bio: 150 words
Chapter length: 6,000–8,000 words
Send submissions and inquiries to: Dr. Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim at deniz.gundogan@khas.edu.tr and denizgundogan@gmail.com
Abstract submission deadline: 30 January 2026
Full chapter deadline: 15 May 2026