Call for Papers: NANO: New American Notes Online (ISSN: 2160-0104)
Special Issue 18: Exploring the Boundary Waters of the Blue
Humanities

Special Issue Guest Editors: Eric Denbang Kunkuri and Dana Van Kooy

Deadline: 16 October 2026

Publication: spring/summer 2027

Full CFP Details: https://nanocrit.com/index.php/home/cfp-plus-submissions-new

The creative and scholarly work being done in the blue humanities has deepened our turn towards exploring waterways and boundary waters. The currents circulating through the blue humanities flow into and from myriad disciplines, including anthropology, biology, decolonial studies, feminist/queer studies, geography, history, indigenous studies, literature, music, performance studies, philosophy, and the visual arts. The cultural and theoretical inlets being carved out by work in the blue humanities have proven generative in terms of developing a distinctive metaphor-laden language, analytic methods like Kamau Brathwaite’s theory of “tidalectics,” and new ways of submerging ourselves in both historical and unprecedented questions about the water that is in and, as Rachel Carson notes in her famous title, “around us.”

For this special issue, we invite submissions of traditional and multimodal essays 
of up to 5,000 words (excluding works cited) that explore the boundary waters of the blue humanities. We encourage essays focused on narratives as well as submissions
that explore art installations and other medial forms that address the boundary waters circulating around and through the blue humanities. 

Topics may include but are not limited to the following:

 Boundary waters that divide and connect nations, classes, and/or ecological zones
 Mythic, cinematic, and visual narratives of how humans and/or nonhumans are “held,” migrate, or are moved through watery littorals
 Critical explorations like those associated with “tidalectics,” a term that comes
from Kamau Brathwaite, who proposed an alternative framework for literary and political engagement that is grounded in the rhythm of waves and the cyclic ebb and flow of tides
 “Portraits” of littoral space(s) in literature, history, myth, the visual arts, and
theatrical and musical performances
 Exploring the significance of physical, structural, and emotional vulnerabilities
and instabilities within littorals, shoals, or port cities
 Hydrological infrastructure (colonial, postcolonial, urban, rural) associated with port cities, canal locks, and dams
 Relational undercurrents that speak to our ways of submerging ourselves into
the watery worlds that surround us
 Traditional water ways: ways of being with or “holding” water
 The role of inland waterways in routing stories and/or facilitating/impeding human and nonhuman migrations
 Exploring the agency of oceans and rivers in sustaining capitalist and imperial
economies and their alternatives
 Water’s many forms (snow, ice, fog, rivers, oceans) and ways “water” facilitates connection and/or imposes isolation
 How waterways—“paths” of water and ways of being with water—lead us to new or alternative futures
 Scenes of erosion that expose lost or forgotten histories

Please direct questions to the special issue editors: Eric Denbang Kunkuri
[edkunkur@mtu.edu] and Dana Van Kooy [drvankoo@mtu.edu]

For questions about the use and disclosure of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, please
see NANO's AI Statement.(https://nanocrit.com/index.php/Journal-Information)

Please use the Submission Form on top left of the CFP
page: https://nanocrit.com/index.php/Submissions/Submission-Form

NANO: New American Notes Online is a free, open-access, peer-reviewed journal.

NANO does not charge for submission, review, or publication. It is indexed in the MLA
International Bibliography, GALE, ProQuest, and DOAJ.