Chairs: Federico Ferretti (University of Bologna, Italy) and Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg (University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy)
Type: in person
Seas, oceans and liquid spaces have always constituted a challenge to geographical representations of the world that were based on terrestrial models and on the principles that we know today as `cartographic reason’, based on linear scales, geometric projections and allegedly objective mapping. Yet, seas and oceans have also been a vehicle for what has been called modernity, world system an later globalization. This session aims at addressing critical historical geographies of seas, oceans and liquid spaces as well as histories of geography and cartography related to these geographical objects, understood both as metaphors and as material places. We especially value critical contributions that question traditional and colonial understandings of the sea as a vehicle for colonization and `civilization’. Likewise, we appreciate critical views on the sea understood as a frontier, which can seek dialogues with current scholarship on critical geopolitics, internationalism, anti-racism and decoloniality. We especially seek contributions on, but not limited to:
• Theoretical definitions of Mediterraneans and other kinds of relationality between land and sea
• The metaphors of water and liquid worlds.
• Liquid spaces and geographical thought.
• Seas, waters and oceans in the history of geography.
• Seas, waters and oceans in the history of cartography.
• Geopolitics of the sea, past and present.
• Black Atlantic, Black Pacific and seas as insurgent places.
• Geo-historical and geo-philosophical definitions of liquid spaces.
• Seas and oceans in critical thought.
• Maritime geopoetics and geo-narratives.
Keywords: history of ocean and seas, ocean and seas: spaces of inclusion and exclusion, the ocean and diversity