Agenda

NICHE Annual Lecture 2026
"Thinking with Water in Horizontal Flows"

Serpil Oppermann
Director of Environmental Humanities Center, Cappadocia University

Abstract

This lecture proposes thinking with water as a horizontal ecological epistemology that reorients environmental thought away from the vertical imaginaries that have long structured ecological ethics. Taking Aldo Leopold’s influential call to “think like a mountain” as its point of departure, it argues that while Leopold’s land ethic transformed modern environmental consciousness, its reliance on elevation, overview, and stability cannot fully account for the fluid, relational, and precarious conditions of contemporary aquatic worlds. In response, the lecture turns to the conceptual interventions of the Blue Humanities to explore a relational mode of thought shaped by immersion, porosity, and interdependence. It focuses on how thinking with water transforms ecological perception.

To think with water is to enter a conceptual and material medium that refuses the fixities of dominant epistemologies. It  shakes our illusions of solidity, separability, continuity, and mastery. If water teaches us anything, it is that cohesion does not imply fixity. With tides, confluences, eddies, and undercurrents, it resists containment, both literal and figurative, and affirms permeability; its opacity is part of its force. As such, water is both future-bearing and past-saturated, always in transit, always becoming.

Ultimately, I argue that water invites us to relinquish the illusion of terracentric sovereignty and to inhabit the world as participants in dynamic horizontal flows that entangle aquatic worlds with human histories and futures alike. In an era of accelerating planetary water crises, such an approach offers new ways of imagining coexistence, responsibility, and more just forms of world-making.

Bio

Serpil Oppermann is Professor of Environmental Humanities and Director of the Environmental Humanities Center at Cappadocia University, Turkey (https://ehc.kapadokya.edu.tr). She served as the 7th President of EASLCE and is a signatory to the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: Second Notice” (2017) and the “World Scientists’ Warning of Climate Emergency” (2020). She is also a member of the Advisory Council of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence). http://meti.org/ advisors

Listed among the world’s top 2% most influential scientists by Stanford University since 2023, Oppermann played a key role in developing material ecocriticism and advancing environmental and blue humanities. She authored Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene (West Virginia UP, 2023), and Blue Humanities: Storied Waters in the Anthropocene (Cambridge UP, 2023). She has also edited or co-edited seven collections and authored over 100 essays and articles on ecocriticism, environmental humanities, and blue humanities. Her collections include Material Ecocriticism (Indiana UP, 2014), Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), both with Serenella Iovino, and Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes (Lexington Books, 2021) with Sinan Akıllı. Her most recent co-edited volume, The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Blue Humanities, is forthcoming in January 2026. She is also the co-founding editor, with Steve Mentz, of Bloomsbury’s The Blue Humanities book series. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/the-blue-humanities/