Drawing on some recent developments in the blue humanities, this book addresses water as a material, political and cultural phenomenon across a variety of spatial and temporal contexts.
Moving beyond the somewhat hackneyed concepts of fluidity and flows, this volume gathers critical perspectives that balance between the scientific, the social, the (bio- )political and the cultural. The contributors to this book draw on a wide and rapidly growing body of scholarship that includes (but is not limited to) maritime, climate change and Anthropocene studies as well as the ‘blue humanities.’ Three major, broadly conceived currents of thought run through these essays: the protean relationalities that water enables; appropriations of water in modernist logics of regulation and management; and the problematic figurations of water in scientific, philosophical, cultural, political and legal discourses. Thematically, the chapters address a wide range of phenomena, events and concepts, including Mediterranean migrant deaths, water as a medium of not- only- human intimacy and queer potentiality, swimming pools, the 2000 Cochabamba water war, the legacy of Grotius’s legal philosophy, imperialist and capitalist notions of property and ownership, notions of purity and contamination, hydroelectricity’s impact on the perception of time, the inadequacy of disciplinary knowledge and pedagogy, and ‘maternal’ figurations of water in some contemporary feminist theorizations.
This book will be of interest to scholars working at the intersection of, broadly conceived, cultural and water studies. It can also be used as a coursebook for teachers offering courses on the politics and aesthetics of water. It was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Ewa Macura- Nnamdi is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia, Poland. Her main research interests revolve around the aesthetics and politics of two issues: refugeehood (and migration more generally) and environmental degradation in the Global South. She examines both phenomena across a cultural archive encompassing literature, film and philosophy. She is currently working on a book titled Law, Refugees and the Sea: Interim Lives (under contract with Routledge) and leading a research grant project titled ‘Weathers of the Future: Climate Change and Displacement’.
Tomasz Sikora teaches literature, culture and theory at UKEN University, Krakow, Poland. His varied research interests include queer theory, literature and cultural studies, gothic and grotesque, biopolitics, environmental humanities and more. He has published two books: Virtually Wild: Wilderness, Technology and the Ecology of Mediation (2003) and Bodies Out of Rule: Transversal Readings in Canadian Literature and Film (2014). He is one of the founders and editors of InterAlia: A Journal of Queer Studies (interalia.queerstudies.pl).