Conference at the University Bremen, 26th – 28th September 2024
Inspired by the low German phrase “Buten un binnen – Wagen un Winnen” (“out and in, dare and win”), which was chiselled onto the front entrance of the city of Bremen’s guildhall in 1899, our conference emerged out of a region that has long been deeply involved in maritime trade. Bremen and Bremerhaven both conceptualize their terrestrial existence from the “outside in” – cities built through and mediated by an almost 1000 year-long history of seafaring and maritime trade.
The phrase “out and in” encapsulates how these cities have long seen themselves as constituted by their oceanic horizons and by the risks and gains, dangers and gifts that this vantage point brings. Similarly, we have witnessed a wave of humanities and social sciences researchers who theorize the world’s oceans not as the vast expanses that begin where inhabited territories end, but as mediators and archives of these territories and their inhabitants. The goal of our conference was to share our knowledge and networks as we think through oceanic materialities, ecologies, world histories, societies, economies and infrastructural projects. How does thinking from the seas and the oceans push us conceptually, theoretically, empirically, methodologically? What does thinking from the water’s edge, from aboard vessels, and from the materiality, movement, and depth of the ocean itself mean for us as we think about current and future research trends? The point about moving from terracentric concepts to the seas and oceans is that it ought to be transformative – more than just a shift of routinized, time-honoured concepts and methods to new sites and locations. Instead, the oceanic turn promises to be a theory machine, as Stefan Helmreich put it – an object in the world that stimulates novel theoretical as well as methodological and empirical formulations.