In the late oughts and 2010s, critical and cultural theory across the humanities embraced the power of positive thinking. If we paid lip service to the determinations of (neo)liberal modernity, our thinking nonetheless gathered with feverish intensity around all that was said to escape or exceed its iron cage. Those of us tutored in assembling a historical ontology of ourselves turned to dreams of possible futures – or else to cultural practices and lifeways whose onto-epistemic difference enacted futurity in the midst of a seemingly endless now. This politics of utopian adjacency crystallized in a now-familiar set of keywords: affirmation, futurity, speculation, utopia, worldmaking, and (of course!) the ever-popular injunction to imagine otherwise.

The Ninth Annual Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference at StokerCon 2026Conference Date: Friday, June 5, 2026Conference Location: The Westin Pittsburgh1000 Penn AvenuePittsburgh, PA 1522and via HopinConference Website: https://www.stokercon.com/Stokercon 2026 will be the tenth anniversary of Stokercon, and the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference is delighted to be a part of this banner year.

Rising water levels in oceans and rivers, streams with high flood waves, and torrential rains that turn puddles into lakes: houses that are currently exposed to such increasingly regular water events are becoming a problematic, if not catastrophic, environment. The protective function that the house is supposed to have according to its original idea and design is being compromised. While roofs and walls are supposed to keep out wind and water—and the traditional European gabled roof is primarily designed to divert water from above—in these extreme weather scenarios, basements are flooded, roofs are torn off, entire houses stand like islands in the water or are even swept away.