Program: Session I
Session I
Wed. 30 September
11:00–12:30
Bryggan (Göran, 2nd floor)
Chair: Otso Kortekangas
Jonas Ullerup Dejgaard (Aarhus University)
Gothic Imaginaries at the Danish West Coast
The ocean is an integral part of Danish history and a major theme in canonical literature. Despite this, Danish literary historiography has largely remained landlocked, expressing what Margaret Cohen has called “hydrophasia.” In my ongoing PhD project, I seek to address this blind spot by investigating how coastal thinking has shaped Danish literature from Romanticism until today.
In this presentation, I focus on one specific watery region of Denmark: the west coast of Jutland. With its storms, tides, dunes, barren landscapes, and dangerous fisheries, this place has fuelled the literary imagination for centuries. Through readings of works by Steen Steensen Bli-cher (1782–1848), H.C. Andersen (1805–1875), and Carit Etlar (1816–1900), I demonstrate how the west coast functions as a literary space in which humanity’s place in an unstable, oceanic world is negotiated.
I argue that these negotiations are often articulated through an ecogothic vocabulary – otherwise largely overlooked in Danish literary historiography – that foregrounds suspense, unpredictability, and non-human agency. Attending to these gothic coastal imaginaries reveals how literature has historical-ly grappled with environmental instability and the limits of human control. As contemporary experi-ences of climate change render the world increasingly oceanic and uncertain, such historical modes of thinking with the sea offer valuable perspectives. By re-centering literary works from the west coast, this paper not only uncovers previously unrecognized patterns in Danish literary history but also con-tributes historical depth and nuance to current debates about human–water relations in a changing climate.
Magne Drangeid (University of Stavanger)
Living with Cold Seas: Affect and Constraint in Cold Water Island Literature
Research in the Blue Humanities has often emphasized water as a space of movement, circulation, and encounter. This paper approaches human–sea relations from a quieter angle by focusing on cold water islands—environments shaped by low temperatures, seasonal limitation, and long term maritime exposure. In such contexts, relations to water are often persistent rather than eventful, and difficult to step outside.
Drawing on contemporary Icelandic literature, the paper forms part of a developing research project on cold water island constraint: a framework for understanding how environmental conditions shape everyday life through enduring relational density, temporality, and limited orientation rather than crisis or disruption. The paper focuses in particular on affect under constraint as one dimension of this experience—alongside relational and temporal forms of limitation.
Through readings of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s Himnaríki og helvíti (Heaven and Hell, 2007/2010) and Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s Afleggjarinn (The Greenhouse, 2007/2011), the analysis examines how cold maritime environments influence emotional life without producing dramatic intensity. In Stefánsson’s novel, fishermen engage with the sea as part of daily work, where loss and danger are present but unresolved. Grief accumulates over time, shaping how the past weighs on the present. In Ólafsdóttir’s novel, environmental exposure is less explicit, yet lives remain oriented toward care, maintenance, and responsibility within a cold and limiting context. Here, affect appears muted rather than intensified.
The paper uses affect under constraint descriptively to capture how emotional life is shaped where conditions remain demanding but stable. By foregrounding cold water island environments, the paper suggests that Blue Humanities scholarship may benefit from attending more closely to endurance and everyday exposure, opening toward comparative discussion of other cold water island contexts.
Tuuli Parviainen (University of Helsinki)
Infusing Marine Community Knowledge into Reimaging Just and Crisis Resilient Marine Futu
Cascading and interconnected socio-ecological crises, such as geopolitical tensions, pandemics, and climate crisis, drastically and rapidly reshape our society. Responding to these challenges requires the inclusion of a wide range of actors and knowledge holders in the crisis governance processes. Yet, locally relevant knowledge remains to be sufficiently integrated into such processes. This post-doctoral research project is centered around a community-based approach to understanding how socio-ecological crises impact and shape local marine environments and the multi-faceted human-marine interactions, as well as the means and capacities to cope with the changes. The empirical focus is on human activities taking place on ice (winter shipping, fishing and hunting, tourism), and on sea ice changes in the Bothnian Bay, Finland. For example, winter shipping is vital for the Finnish economy as well as the security of supply. The prevailing risks related to winter shipping (e.g. due to harsh winter conditions) are amplified due to geopolitical tensions, climate crises, as well as due to increased use of marine space due to, e.g. construction of offshore wind energy. This on-going research explores the similarities and differences in how relevant marine actors understand and perceive the impacts of socio-ecological crises and what are seen as possible future scenarios for crisis resilient and just marine communities. The methods include policy document analysis and literature review, interviews, walking workshops and participant observation, future-orientated workshops, and participatory seascape mapping.
Isabel Arce Zelada (University College Dublin)
Decolonising the Caribbean Sea: Tracing Maritime Boundaries
Through the ancestral knowledge of those Indigenous to the currents of the Caribbean Sea, the European colonisation project documented the sea in ways that tracked and surveyed the movement of people, ships and cargo. The sea was imagined as a necrotic terrain to conquer, weaponise and survey, rather than the vibrant ‘aquatic motorway’ (Hofman, et al. 2010) that it had been.
By documenting the sea, the colonising subjects could determine when someone was criminally or legally at sea. These inscriptions upon the sea, that transformed people into legal or illegal navigators constantly shifted with the will of those governing the land, appearing in the 20th century as restrictive policies that created maritime boundaries and countless interdictions in the Caribbean.
Despite the constant rewriting of the Caribbean Sea, it has also safeguarded the Taíno beliefs, the pantheon of Orishas and connected the peoples of the Caribbean despite the borders that were imposed on them. Maritime boundaries, have nonetheless, tried to break these connections by policing the Windward passage between Haiti and Cuba, “safeguarding” US territorial waters surrounding Florida, and creating an archipelago of detention centres around the Caribbean for those caught migrating through it.
This paper seeks to trace the layered Caribbean Sea through the imaginings of the people that lived in relationship to it and the ways in which those historical relationships shape the current Caribbean struggle for decolonisation.