Chairs: Gabriella Palermo and Giulia de Spuches (University of Palermo, Italy)

Type: in person

In the last few decades, what is called the oceanic turn (Anderson and Peters 2014; Bear 2017; Blum 2010; Peters and Steinberg 2015, 2019; DeLoughrey 2016, 2019; Peters et al. 2022) has strongly emerged within the geographies of the sea, the environmental humanities and more generally the social sciences. This new positionality at the sea level works on the one hand, to observe the new forms assumed by the relationship between capitalism and the sea; on the other hand, to develop alternative policies, narratives and relationships suggested by, for, on, with water. This turn is actually intertwined with multiple turns within geographical research, as for example the material (re)turn (Whatmore 2006) or the volumetric turn (Peters and Turner 2018; Jackman and Squire 2021). Specifically, the feminist new materialisms work to foster the possibility of thinking with the oceanic (Alaimo 2012, Neimanis 2019) in order to develop new ecologies, new imaginaries and more-than-human relations as an intervention in a world marked by the violence of extractive and anthropocentric capitalism (Haraway 2016, Tsing 2015); a world in which, at the same time, it is necessary to intervene in order to construct alternative possible futures. Positioning ourselves in this weaving process, in this session we seek contributions that observe the sea and the oceanic as spaces of possibility and promotion of other imaginaries, other narratives and other politics through new materialisms and more-than-human geographies.

Keywords: critical ocean thinking, oceanic turns, new materialism, more-than-human; imaginaries

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