Drawing on some recent developments in the Blue Humanities, this book addresses water as a material, political and cultural phenomenon across a variety of spatial and temporal contexts.

Moving beyond the somewhat hackneyed concepts of fluidity and flows, this volume gathers critical perspectives that balance between the scientific, the social, the (bio-)political and the cultural. The contributors to this issue draw on a wide and rapidly growing body of scholarship that includes (but is not limited to) maritime, climate change and Anthropocene studies as well as the ‘blue humanities.’ Three major, broadly conceived currents of thought run through these essays: the protean relationalities that water enables; appropriations of water in modernist logics of regulation and management; and the problematic figurations of water in scientific, philosophical, cultural, political and legal discourses. Thematically, the articles address a wide range of phenomena, events and concepts, including Mediterranean migrant deaths, water as a medium of not-only-human intimacy and queer potentiality, swimming pools, the 2000 Cochabamba water war, the legacy of Grotius’s legal philosophy, imperialist and capitalist notions of property and ownership, notions of purity and contamination, hydroelectricity’s impact on the perception of time, the inadequacy of disciplinary knowledge and pedagogy, and ‘maternal’ figurations of water in some contemporary feminist theorizations.

This book will be of interest to scholars working at the intersection of, broadly conceived, cultural and water studies. It can also be used as a coursebook for teachers offering courses on the politics and aesthetics of water. It was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.