NeMLA 2027 annual convention - Newport, RI (March 6-9 2027)

Thinking with water has become a crucial resource for navigating the Anthropocene, whose increasingly aquatic character is reshaping human and nonhuman life on the planet. Rising seas, intensified flooding, and shifting hydrological cycles underscore the need to rethink dominant terrestrial frameworks of being and knowledge. Indigenous knowledge systems, grounded in relational, non-linear, and non-anthropocentric thinking, offer powerful onto-epistemological alternatives to extractivist and mainland-centered paradigms. They provide conceptual and material tools for inhabiting a fundamentally “wet” world in which boundaries between land and water, solidity and fluidity, surface and depth are increasingly unstable. This panel explores Indigenous communities’ ways of knowing and interacting with aquatic environments, including oceans, rivers, lakes, wetlands, and subterranean waters. It is particularly interested in how Indigenous literatures and visual arts register, sense, and theorize watery worlds, as well as in the relational logics embedded in these practices. The panel also considers forms of empowerment, self-determination, and resilience that Indigenous communities enact in response to ecological transformation and environmental crisis. Situated within the Blue Humanities, the panel welcomes contributions on Indigenous aquatic epistemologies and relational practices in literary and visual cultures.

Topics may include, but are not limited to: aquatic Indigenous cosmologies; water as archive and memory; decolonial Blue Humanities; hydrosocial relations and sovereignty; Indigenous environmental knowledge and climate change; aquatic embodiment and perception in Indigenous storytelling traditions; riverine and oceanic futurisms; and Indigenous resistance to water extraction and pollution.

The session's modality will be hybrid (in-person but accepting remote presentations).

All abstract submissions must be submitted through the NeMLA portal at the following link: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22359