Session: 6g
Day: Friday 17 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 2.18
Chair: Ifor Duncan

Speakers:

• Marrigje Paijmans (University of Amsterdam)
• Julée Al-Bayaty de Ridder (University of Amsterdam)
• Rosanne van der Voet (Leiden University)
• Guðrún í Jákupsstovu (University of the Faroe Islands)

Roundtable description: 

How does water as a nonhuman mediating agent and a living multispecies ecosystem resist manifestations of human exceptionalism, capitalism and the Anthropocene? Considering floods, droughts, and declining drinking water quality from a new-materialist perspective, disturbed water-human relations come to the fore as a main indicator of environmental crisis. We reflect on ways in which water balances, confronts and resists exploitative human interventions in the environment. We invite three speakers to briefly reflect on this question: 

1. How does water manifest in human and more-than-human patterns of thinking and expression? In times of rising sea levels and environmental crisis, Rosanne van der Voet’s research examines how we must reckon with the complex trajectories of water that resist human forgetting. How does the paradox of water as nurturing on the one hand and as menacing on the other evolve as we explore multispecies communities and expressions? 
2. What does it mean to talk about “oceanic territory”? Drawing on the case of the Faroe Islands, a tiny country in landmass but considered a ‘large ocean nation’ due to its oceanic jurisdiction and reliance on maritime industries, Guðrun í Jákupsstovu considers the paradoxical boundary between the framing of watery spaces as resources and territories and the ocean’s ultimate uninhabitability for humans. This highlights how watery spaces resist and unsettle ideas of human mastery and exceptionalism. 
3. How can thinking with water pollution reimagine multi-species encounters, affectivities, intentionalities and agencies? Julée Al-Bayaty de Ridder explores water resistance as a defiance against the attempt to separate humans from aquatic environments. Water reminds us that it is never just H2O, but always in combination with materials and toxins that are present in human and more-than-human bodies. 

The aim of the roundtable is to probe existing theoretical frameworks for water research in literary and cultural studies, and to consider novel perspectives on nonhuman aquatic resistance. How can we approach water resistance from different disciplines, ranging from environmental, (post)colonial, socio-political, historical to scientific perspectives? 

Finally, we consider this roundtable an opportunity for establishing a European network for research on water conflicts and aquatic multispecies interactions in the Humanities. 

Bios: 

Marrigje Paijmans is Assistant Professor in Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. She has published on early modern colonialism in e.g. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies and Cultural History, and co-edited Slavery in the Cultural Imagination: Debates, Silences, and Dissent in the Neerlandophone Space (2025) for AUP. Currently, she started a project at the intersection of ecology and colonialism: ‘How to Welcome the Water: Re-Imagining Water through Marginalised Stories in the Neerlandophone Space.’

Julée Al-Bayaty de Ridder is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. Her project ‘Re-imagining Water through Marginalized Stories in the Neerlandophone Space’ explores contemporary literature, oral history, performance and arts in the Netherlands and former Dutch colonial spaces in Brazil and Indonesia. This project aims to pose resistance to the age-old Dutch narrative of a ‘battle against the water’ in order to make space for alternative encounters that reimagine ways of living with water. She has published on extinction cascades in Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism. 

Rosanne van der Voet is Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities and Urban Studies at Leiden University. Her research spans across various interdisciplinary strands of the blue humanities, with particular focus on more-than-human experience of environmental issues, creative-critical approaches and applied ecocritical analysis of new nature-based water management projects in urban and industrial environments in the Netherlands. Her first book, Literary Storytelling and the Environmental Crisis of the Oceans: Jellyfish Poetics is forthcoming in the Routledge environmental humanities series.  

Guðrun í Jákupsstovu is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of the Faroe Islands. Her research explores literary representations of islands, coastlines and oceans and focuses particularly on how these settings produce particular experiences of time in relation to climate change and the Anthropocene. She has published on Anthropocene temporalities in the journal Nordeuropaforum and is currently working on the manuscript for her first monograph. In the coming time, she will be turning her attention towards Faroese oceanic literature and how these can be read together with contemporary geopolitical tensions in the North Atlantic Ocean.