In this workshop, we propose to look at policy, industry and scientific documents alongside literary forms as speculative narratives discursively creating the seabed and the ocean. Our aim is twofold; first to consider the colonial and imperial underpinnings of ocean science and law and how these permeate current negotiations on a so-called mining code. These plans can be read as speculative narratives of the seabed and deep ocean ecosystems, though ones where they do not have a voice. Thus, the second part of this session asks how these underpinnings can be unlearned with speculative fiction, music and narratives, and how we can decolonially think with the seabed. We will draw on works by the clipping, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Rivers Solomon’s novella The Deep in tackling these questions.
The Deep imagines the deep sea as a repository for history, and proposes an underwater society which destabilises binary notions of past/present, gender, species and sexuality. Speculative fiction imagines alternative realities and potential futures with no claim to real feasibility. Looking at both literary and political as well as scientific speculative narratives can help us understand how attempts to imagine a way of “better” living depends on which values, ideals, hopes and anxieties are projected onto an unknown future. Please sign up officially via KSL (488213-FS2024-0)
