Reimagining Water Geographies
Convenors: Daniela Desperati (University of Bergamo), Anna Karlsdottir (University of Iceland), Filippo Menga (University of Bergamo)
Water is routinely invoked as a universal, connective substance. Yet the ways it is narrated and conceptualised in geography can also reproduce exclusion, erasure, and spatial injustice. This tension helps explain why, in recent years, scholars have highlighted a persistent divide between island/ocean studies and freshwater/saltwater scholarship, and why the relational turn has worked to reconnect these conversations across island studies, maritime geopolitics, ocean studies, and freshwater research. In that literature, the ocean is increasingly framed not as empty space between lands but as medium and social construction, an agent that can connect or separate islands and ‘main’ lands (Steinberg, 2013).
Seen from this angle, the problem is not only empirical scarcity or environmental change, but also the conceptual habits that still organize water worlds through inherited binaries such as fresh/salt, island/mainland, land/sea, nature/society, which in turn shape what counts as a “water problem,” who is made responsible, and which lives and places are rendered peripheral, disposable, or out of place. Even when such dichotomies are recognized as colonial legacies to overcome, the debate keeps returning to the same challenge: how to “think with water” (Neimanis, 2013), how to adopt a “tidalectic” perspective on routes and rootedness (Pugh, 2016), and how to take water seriously (Menga, 2025), together with Massey’s “throwntogetherness” as a way of understanding watery co-existence without flattening power and to knit such themes together with the fluid geographies interstices (Kelman, 2023) that are particularly evident in small islands and remote communities.
This session invites contributions that ask how critical geography might turn the tide by thinking with water as relation, medium, and more-than-human material force, while staying attentive to uneven power, deterritorialisation, and colonial legacies. We are especially interested in work that reconnects conversations often kept apart (island/ocean studies and freshwater scholarship; maritime geopolitics and hydro-feminist approaches), and that develops concepts and methods able to track entanglements across scales and across watery environments.
We welcome papers that explore (but are not limited to) the following themes:
- Reworking key concepts: planetary waters, islands, coasts, basins, watery bodies and more;
- Empirical “water places” where injustice is produced/contested (infrastructure, extraction, conservation, borders, mobility/immobility, militarization, tourism, disasters);
- Methods for analyzing water as relation (fresh–salt continuums, land–sea interfaces, multi-sited approaches, mapping/visual methods, more-than-human methodologies);
- Insights on the plural material dimensions of water and its essentiality in human-made environment, as well as its relations with infrastructures and measures to be taken to respond to climate change and global challenges
- Epistemic politics: how water categories travel, whom they privilege, and what alternative, decolonial geographies they enable.
- Approaches towards mobilities, everyday practices of co-habitation, place-making as more-than-human interactions in watery places (such as islands, remote and perceived-as-marginal places)
Please email 250-word abstracts to Daniela Desperati (daniela.desperati at unibg.it) by Friday 20th February 2026.
References:
– Kelman I., The island as a political interstice, Political Geography, 107 (2023)
– Massey D., For space, Sage publications, 2005
– Menga F., Thirst, Verso, 2025
– Rusca M., Browne A.L., Di Baldassarre G., Menga F., Pluralising the materiality of water: more-than-human-water, lively waters, water with, and the agency of hydro-social assemblages, Nature and Space, vol.8(1) 3-12, 2025
– Neimanis A., Bezan S., Hydrofeminism in the coastline: an interview with Astrida Neimanis, Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman, 2022
– Neimanis A., Bodies of water, posthuman feminist phenomenology, Bloomsbury, 2013
– Pugh J., The relational turn in island geographies: bringing together island, sea and ship relations and the case of Landship, Social & Cultural Geography, 2016
– Steinberg E. P., Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions, Atlantic Studies, vol.10 n.2, 2013
Filippo Menga 