About The Project

Rethinking Blue Modernity Toward Cross-Cultural Dialogues And A Shared Future

Cappadocia University has been pursuing a Project entitled “Imagining a Common Horizon for Humanity and the Planet” that brings together the leading thinkers of the world to create an international intellectual platform that draws its strength from human dignity and that aims to build for the future of humanity and the planet with a holistic synergy with a view to offering humanity a common horizon. The aim is to provide an academic platform through whichesteemed intellectuals from around the world can share their visions for a common future of humanity and our planet and to comment on the challenges and opportunities they envision.

Our component of this project, entitled “Rethinking Blue Modernity Toward Cross-Cultural Dialogues and a Shared Future,” aims to initiate dialogue about how water—a fundamental requirement of life—has defined and sustained human civilizations over time and across the globe. Water has been (and will increasingly be in the future) at the source of wars, is fundamental to the national security and political policies of every nation on the planet, and is under threat like never before. How we see water is critical to how we proceed at this point in history.

This project brings together different ways of seeing our global waters and seeks to rethink water not merely as an exploitable and extractable resource but as a site of histories, forms of knowledge, memories, and cultural values. Contributors are invited to engage with the project from the perspective of their own local histories, languages, cultural memories, and intellectual traditions. We are particularly interested in reflections that include, but are not limited to the following literary topics:

  • water as a site of power;
  • water in Indigenous and local knowledge systems;
  • history and cultural identity and the roles of oceans, rivers, and wetlands;
  • activism, the Blue Humanities, climate change, sea-level rise, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity;
  • reimagining human/water relationships within cross-currents of activism, policy, literature, art, and philosophy;
  • migration, extraction, displacement, mobility, privatization, pollution, and environmental injustice;

What are the possibilities for envisioning a heterogenous global community with a shareddestiny grounded in ecological interdependence, and where does water fit in to all of this? What are the productive confluences among different narrative and theoretical ways of apprehending both the growing hydrological crises and the growing consciousness of these crises? Climate refugeeism is almost always related with water in some way—too much of it, too little of it, wrong amounts of it at the wrong times, storms it generates because it is too hot, changes in its currents (and thus its ability to moderate climates), its function as a conduit for human sins, and so on. We are particularly interested in reflections that examine moments when local histories were interrupted, reconfigured, or displaced through the processes of modernity/coloniality, as well as through the broader historical trajectories associated with Westernization of and reformatting of the non-Western communities.

About The Project

Rethinking Blue Modernity Toward Cross-Cultural Dialogues And A Shared Future

Cappadocia University has been pursuing a Project entitled “Imagining a Common Horizon for Humanity and the Planet” that brings together the leading thinkers of the world to create an international intellectual platform that draws its strength from human dignity and that aims to build for the future of humanity and the planet with a holistic synergy with a view to offering humanity a common horizon. The aim is to provide an academic platform through whichesteemed intellectuals from around the world can share their visions for a common future of humanity and our planet and to comment on the challenges and opportunities they envision.

Our component of this project, entitled “Rethinking Blue Modernity Toward Cross-Cultural Dialogues and a Shared Future,” aims to initiate dialogue about how water—a fundamental requirement of life—has defined and sustained human civilizations over time and across the globe. Water has been (and will increasingly be in the future) at the source of wars, is fundamental to the national security and political policies of every nation on the planet, and is under threat like never before. How we see water is critical to how we proceed at this point in history.

This project brings together different ways of seeing our global waters and seeks to rethink water not merely as an exploitable and extractable resource but as a site of histories, forms of knowledge, memories, and cultural values. Contributors are invited to engage with the project from the perspective of their own local histories, languages, cultural memories, and intellectual traditions. We are particularly interested in reflections that include, but are not limited to the following literary topics:

  • water as a site of power;
  • water in Indigenous and local knowledge systems;
  • history and cultural identity and the roles of oceans, rivers, and wetlands;
  • activism, the Blue Humanities, climate change, sea-level rise, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity;
  • reimagining human/water relationships within cross-currents of activism, policy, literature, art, and philosophy;
  • migration, extraction, displacement, mobility, privatization, pollution, and environmental injustice;

What are the possibilities for envisioning a heterogenous global community with a shareddestiny grounded in ecological interdependence, and where does water fit in to all of this? What are the productive confluences among different narrative and theoretical ways of apprehending both the growing hydrological crises and the growing consciousness of these crises? Climate refugeeism is almost always related with water in some way—too much of it, too little of it, wrong amounts of it at the wrong times, storms it generates because it is too hot, changes in its currents (and thus its ability to moderate climates), its function as a conduit for human sins, and so on. We are particularly interested in reflections that examine moments when local histories were interrupted, reconfigured, or displaced through the processes of modernity/coloniality, as well as through the broader historical trajectories associated with Westernization of and reformatting of the non-Western communities.