SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS - Wet Geographies I- Under the Sea: Geographies of the Deep
Sponsored by the Political Geography Research Group and the Social & Cultural Research Group
RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2015, Exeter. 2-4 September 2015
Session Conveners:
Cordelia Freeman, University of Nottingham
Rachael Squire, Royal Holloway
Recent geographical scholarship has fervently challenged the flat horizontalism that has long shaped understandings of space and the operation of power over territory (see Elden, 2013). However, in spite of moves to take seriously a world of verticality and volume (see also Adey, 2012), the sea (surface, water column and sea bottom) has been largely omitted in discussions that have moved geographies beyond areal or surface dimensions. The inaccessibility of the sea, which often rationalises its exclusion from academic debate (Steinberg 1999), poses particular problems when turning our attention to underwater spaces. It is widely acknowledged that we know less of the deep seas than we do of outer space.
The vitalities, mobilities, and materialities of the seas are increasingly being explored in geographical scholarship to both gain an understanding of this traditionally neglected space and to produce ‘wet ontologies’ that have wide application on terra firma (Steinberg and Peters, forthcoming). This session sits within this maritime turn and seeks to advance critical geographic scholarship on the sea by engaging with cultural-political questions of human interactions with, and in, the complex environment of undersea space. How is the sea’s ever changing materiality, from liquid, to solid, to vapour, better understood through frames of height and depth, and how does this voluminous matter come to bear on how humans interact with it? How has the sea been inhabited and made known through ‘depth’? How is the legal zoning of the seas – from territorial waters, exclusive economic zones, through to the high seas and the outer continental shelves and deep seabed – impacted by questions of depth?
These questions could be explored via activities such as surveying, fishing and whaling, deep sea mining, where undersea space, resources, and life are brought to the surface, through oceanographic or militaristic technologies, or perhaps through embodied acts of diving. We welcome papers that speak to these themes and others that will advance this field by exploring how the sea’s geophysics and materiality are experienced and negotiated.
This session is partnered with two other sessions; Wet Geographies II- Water in the Anthropocene: creative approaches and Wet Geographies III- Water-worlds: art practices and wet ecologies. Proceedings will conclude with a panel discussion that will serve to draw out and reflect on themes emerging from across the Wet Geographies discussions.
This session, Wet Geographies I- Under the Sea: Geographies of the Deep is being organised by Cordelia Freeman (University of Nottingham – [log in to unmask]) and Rachael Squire (Royal Holloway – [log in to unmask])
Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words and full contact details to both organisers by 6th February 2015.
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