Dr. Paula von Gleich 

This international, interdisciplinary workshop examines the interplay between extreme water events—floods, droughts, contamination crises—and the broader cultural, historical, and political climates that shape and normalize them. Engaging perspectives from literary and cultural studies, Indigenous and Black studies, historiography, maritime social sciences, and the

blue humanities, the workshop explores water’s dual role as both a destructive force and a foundation of all life on this planet. Workshop contributions will investigate how structural inequalities shaped by transatlantic enslavement, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy intersect with water-based states of emergency. Special attention will be given to water-human and

inter-species relationships, water-centric epistemologies, and marginalized perspectives. Moreover, the workshop will foster interdisciplinary dialogue within and across different strands of the humanities about the entanglement of extreme states of water with cultures of resistance and histories of oppression.