We are living in a time of extreme weather, ecological shift, and infrastructural decay, much of which is related to questions surrounding water. To further analyze the ways that water is affected by and in turn shapes our world, Blue Humanities emerges to critically contend with a shifting landscape. Our attempt through this panel is to expand the conversation by intentionally incorporating the nuances of trauma and infrastructure studies.  

From the outset, the overlap between water, trauma, and infrastructure is multi-faceted. Trauma and Infrastructure are both sectors which present as needing to be “managed” but on a spatial and temporal scale, as well as an individual and collective scale, both lenses go beyond management to reframe how we think about the present and futurity. Despite the enormous elemental presence of water on a planetary scale, most of Earth’s water has been incorporated within some form of infrastructural milieu such as national border infrastructures, transportation infrastructure, shipping and trade, and security and military expansion. In doing so, water as a medium becomes a unique vessel for mediating, negotiating, and articulating trauma originating from failure and deficiencies in existing infrastructure.  

We invite proposals which reckon with the functionality of blue infrastructure, not just in the strict confines of one story, but opens the conversation so that we may triangulate the ways in which decay, damage, and debris affect communities, species, and spaces across time. This panel aims to focalize these points of intersection and examine the role and potential for water infrastructure as a medium for trauma transmission during legacies of loss.  Infrastructure is an inherently comparative system, because it is meant to manage and govern across space, time, and species. So, exploring environmental infrastructures open up the possibility of bringing in the tenets of comparative literature towards intertextual connections, but also has opportunities to articulate the relations between community and their narratives.  

We welcome scholars working on relevant literary texts or other cultural narratives such as music, audio-visual medium, performances, arts, archival materials or oral traditions, and other narrative forms. Possible topics can include:  

• Technical and social aspects of blue infrastructure, such as maintenance, governance, and functionality 

• Institutional Recourse of blue infrastructure, its access and limitations  

• Negotiating visibility/invisibility through water

• Slow violence and its spatio-temporal impact on infrastructure

• Materiality of water  

• Water as a vector of trauma transmission  

• Necropolitical modalities of water  

• Legacies of trauma through water (ex: trans-atlantic slave trade, military history of the pacific) 

• Permeability of water  

• Systemic opacity  

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Asmita Saha ([email protected]) or Jordan Grunawalt ([email protected]).