Throughout the twentieth century, water has been an object of study by different disciplines, perspectives and cultures, often driven by a variety of ideological positionings. An ever-present subject of political, economic, geographic and cultural debate, water has, in parallel, been used materially and symbolically in a variety of artistic, literary, cinematic, and sonic projects, within the creative environment. Previously taken for granted and fixed units of analysis, or ways of seeing, based on concepts such as time, space, nation-state, socio-economic formation, are no longer seen as bounded and delimited based on the ‘permanent’ imagined site of ‘land’. Influx, fluidity, perturbation, liquidity, self-representation, immigration, homelessness, nomadism, stateless, are but examples of the discursive and aesthetic formations used by researchers and artists who consciously and constantly reposition their epistemic and aesthetic premises across the continuum between the two poles of water–land.
More recently, the intersections between climate change, late capitalism and neo-colonialism, a globalised trade system, the advent of the anthropocene, and the deep, mostly catastrophic, transformations of those junctions, have incited many scholars and artists to look for alternative understandings of the role of water and its intrinsic relationship to life that explore better futures.
Such approaches will be the focus of this conference. During the last 2 months, we invited proposals for papers spanning a range of disciplines, including, but not limited to, politics, economics, geography, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, cultural studies and the creative arts, that take water as their central theme. Within this we welcomed proposals that consider water as both a site of traditional and emerging knowledge, of regulation and of liberation, of the managed and the unmanaged, and as a site of fluidity and liquidity that might offer greater understanding of the past, the present and what might be to come.
A total of 27 speakers were selected by submitting a 500-word abstract via an Open Call. The proposals were carefully reviewed and selected by Dr. Ismail Nashif, Professor of Anthropology at Doha Institute, in conversation with the co-artistic directors of Rubaiyat Qatar Mark Rappolit and Tom Eccles.
The selection of the proposals can be categorised into nine different categories:
- Arts
- Film Studies
- Literature
- Philosophy
- History
- Politics
- Social Sciences
- Gulf Studies
- Palestine Studies
In addition, the artistic directors have selected a series of artists and films to screen as part of the conference.