Programme

Medea begins at the water's edge. Daughter of Eidyia, an Oceanid and child of Oceanus, she emerges from a genealogy defined by currents, crossings, and tidal instability. In the geographical imagination of Classical Greece, her homeland of Colchis marked the outer limits of the civilised world: a littoral zone where the polis dissolves into perceived barbarism. Suspended between goddess and woman, citizen and stranger, Medea embodies a hydrographic threshold before she becomes a juridical and political problem. 
 

This paper approaches Medea as a mythic figure whose oceanic genealogy encodes a politics of liminality and whose adaptive afterlives illuminate the entanglement of gender, ecology, and catastrophe. From Euripides onward, her story takes the form of an adaptable performance, shaped by rewriting, translation, and cultural migration, with the sea serving as the enduring horizon of myth, sustaining narratives of passage, exile, and return.
Tracing contemporary prose, film, and popular culture rewritings, I show how Medea's fluid alterity resurfaces in narratives of climate crisis, gendered excess, and maritime rebellion. Read against Europe's securitised "liquid borders" and the relentless cycles of warfare and domination, Medea becomes a critical lens through which to examine how myth mediates the exclusionary logics of the Anthropocene.
 

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where the shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere”
(Rachel Carson, “Undersea” The Atlantic, September 1937)

“The number of living creatures of all Orders whose existence intimately depends on kelp is wonderful … I can only compare these great aquatic forests of the southern hemisphere with the terrestrial ones in the intertropical regions. Yet if in any country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe as many species of animals would perish as would here from the destruction of kelp.” 
(Charles Darwin 1839)

In a world shaped by intensifying climate crisis, environmental storytelling emerges as both fragile and urgent. The ocean—the planet’s largest ecosystem and a site of myth, extraction, and violence—has become a focal point of planetary vulnerability, as climate change accelerates sea-level rise, ocean warming and acidification, biodiversity loss, and species extinction. While scientific evidence has made these transformations undeniable, this talk argues that data alone cannot address the cultural imaginaries that sustain extractive relations with marine environments. Drawing on feminist posthumanities, oceanic humanities, and science and technology studies, I introduce the concept of storying exposure as an affective, relational practice for engaging damaged seas. Inspired by feminist scholarship on storytelling, the keynote explores how myths, speculative narratives, and “storied bodies out of order”—from chemical warfare debris to invasive oysters—can function as counter-narratives to consumerist imaginaries. Rather than seeking technofixes, the talk advances environmental literacy as a posthumanities practice of “hospicing modernity,” cultivating forms of care and coexistence appropriate to wounded marine worlds. In doing so, it reframes water myths as vital tools for rethinking relationality, responsibility, and life with oceans in the Anthropocene.