Workshop | Thinking Materially
8 – 9 November 2018
Blue Waters Hotel, Durban
The first workshop of the Oceanic Humanities project took place overlooking the Indian Ocean, on the north end of the waterfront in Durban. Participants were invited to think the material alongside the social, imagined or abstract ocean, through papers on individual maritime objects. Participants presented papers that brought the sea into conversation with their own research, focused on: harbour walls, concrete, plankton, middens, salt, oyster shells, seaweed, sea wolves, mermaids, barnacles, cyclones and shipwrecks, wind and current, creeks, the Mesosaurus, beach and seashore.
The workshop resulted in a special issue, ‘Water’, of the journal Wasafiri: International Contemporary Writing.
The first workshop of the Oceanic Humanities project took place overlooking the Indian Ocean, on the north end of the waterfront in Durban. Participants were invited to think the material alongside the social, imagined or abstract ocean, through papers on individual maritime objects. Participants presented papers that brought the sea into conversation with their own research, focused on: harbour walls, concrete, plankton, middens, salt, oyster shells, seaweed, sea wolves, mermaids, barnacles, cyclones and shipwrecks, wind and current, creeks, the Mesosaurus, beach and seashore.
The workshop resulted in a special issue, ‘Water’, of the journal Wasafiri: International Contemporary Writing.