7th ASLE-ASEAN Ecocritical Conference: Flows & Waves
January 14, 2027 – January 16, 2027
As rising seas, polluted rivers, and climate driven disasters increasingly reveal the precarity of life on a water planet, the blue humanities call for renewed attention to oceans, rivers, coasts, and aquatic worlds as vital forces shaping histories, cultures, and futures. Moving beyond land centered and anthropocentric frameworks, blue humanities scholarship foregrounds the material, symbolic, and political flows that bind humans to seas, currents, marine life, and watery infrastructures. In ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, water emerges not merely as a backdrop but as an active presence that reshapes narratives of belonging, mobility, memory, and survival.
Southeast Asia offers a particularly rich site for blue humanities inquiry. As a region constituted by archipelagos, river systems, monsoon cycles, and maritime routes, Southeast Asia has long been shaped by intimate human and water entanglements, from indigenous cosmologies and epics to contemporary literature, visual art, performance, film, and activist practices.
Situated in Panay, Philippines, the birthplace of the epic Hinilawod, the ASLE ASEAN Conference 2027 foregrounds water as both archive and living presence. In the Hinilawod, rivers and oceans raise heroes and civilizations, embodying ecological knowledge, cultural memory, and political struggle that continue to resonate in the present.
We seek to examine how aquatic worlds shape cultural production, ecological thought, and ethical relations, while also contributing regionally grounded insights to global conversations on oceanic studies, environmental justice, and more than human futures.
The conference invites scholars, writers, artists, and activists from across Southeast Asia and beyond to participate in keynote lectures, panel sessions, seminars, and creative forums. Selected papers will be considered for publication in the Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism.
