EXTENDED DEADLIN: 15 Jan 2024!

Edited by Ewelina Jarosz, Karolina Kolenda, Tomasz Sikora.

This book seeks to reimagine the evolving identities and future(s) of the Baltic Sea region drawing on the perspectives offered by environmental humanities, blue posthumanities, and environmental art, while developing (hydro)feminist, queer, and sex-positive perspectives in these fields of research. As a response to the challenges posed by the global climate crisis, this volume explores the Baltic Sea as the center of the region’s ecosystem as well as a point of reference for developing new collective identities and transformative, more-than-human futures. The contemporary water crisis requires solutions that envision sustainable futures based on multispecies alliances and environmental justice. Advocating transspecies solidarity and emphasizing the agency of water and marine life, we need to reinvent the Baltic Sea as that which connects rather than divides; to revisit its dominating cultural imaginaries; and to redefine its naturecultural boundaries. A project like this requires dynamic transdisciplinary perspectives that boldly combine marine sciences with environmental humanities, research with artistic speculation, and activism.

The Baltic Sea is one of the most polluted seas on the planet, which results from a variety of factors, such as heavy commercial, recreational, and military traffic, high-tropic sea-farming, as well as multiple biological and anthropogenic factors. The region’s complex history has transformed it into a graveyard and wasteland, marked by sunken ships, toxic waste, and other byproducts of the military-industrial complex. As a source of trauma for both human and non-human entities, the Baltic Sea provokes affective responses that link individual situated and embodied experiences with transgenerational (post)memory and multispecies compassion. We encourage perspectives that capture the condition of cruising between dystopia and utopia in the process of reimagining the Baltic Sea, encompassing both exhaustion, mourning, and grief, as well as experimental (and sexual) engagement aimed at inventing new ways of collective living and becoming. We believe a focus on estrangement, curiosity, ambiguity, bewilderment, and adaptation will help move beyond the constraints of narrow identity (geo)politics in thinking about the Baltic Sea region, determined as they have been by competitive regionalisms, conservatisms, nationalisms, legalisms, and gender/sexual normativities.

We are interested in exploring artistic, cultural, and scientific practices that employ multiple media, including digital art and ecotechnologies, in the context of building transspecies solidarities and developing an inclusive and diverse language for addressing environmental crises. Such practices entail, among other things, reflection on the reduction or elimination of the environmental costs in cultural, social, and scientific production. At the same time, rather than treat the Baltic Sea as an isolated naturecultural ecosystem, we encourage perspectives that explore how local knowledges and embodied experiences translate into practices (artistic and other) that connect the Baltic with other bodies of water and planetary (hyper)entities. Particularly welcome are inter- and transdisciplinary approaches.

For queries and draft proposals please get in touch with Ewelina Jarosz at ewelina.jaroszup.krakow.pl. We are extending the deadline for abstracts to approximately 1800 characters (including the working title, references, affiliation, and contact information) to January 15, 2024. Please note that this is a tentative date for submissions.