Aquatic Thinking in a Fluid Age
Aquatic Thinking in a Fluid Age
Dates: 17, 24 April, 8, 15, 22 May 2025
Time: 15:30-17:15
Location: Radboud University
Instructors: László Munteán, Jeroen Boom
Credits: 5 ECTS
Register ↯
In the wake of what Cecilia Chen, Janine Macleod, and Astrida Neimanis call the “hydrological turn,” in this course, we reflect on the discursive function of water and how thinking with water can help to counter the solid assumptions of terrestrial epistemologies (Chen et al. 2013). We map out different aquatic metaphors and critically navigate the oceanic worlds that they evoke, celebrating their potential to unground earthly forms of knowledge while also reflecting on the dangers of their performative power. We ask, for example, how an adjective such as “amphibious” helps us to think beyond anthropocentric worldviews (Jensen 2017; Ten Bos 2009) or how a term like “leakiness” erodes the fixed borders between nature/culture (Neimanis 2017), yet we also want to acknowledge the slipperiness of such words, asking how the watery metaphor of “flows” connects migration policies to a seamlessness that conceals the obstructions that refugees experience (Cox et al. 2020), or how the concept of “streams” hides the inherent frictions within digital platform infrastructures (Niessen, 2024). We will discuss such watery wor(l)ds in aesthetic, political, forensic, and ecological contexts to start thinking about how their aquatic material resonance trickles into the ways we think about the realities they aim to describe.
We will engage with a maelstrom of theoretical works by, among others, Stacy Alaimo, Gaston Bachelard, Cecilia Chen, Gilles Deleuze, Édouard Glissant, Melody Jue, Astrida Neimanis, and Edwige Tamalet Talbayev. After a more general introduction during our first session, the course will be structured around four watery metaphors.