Across Oceans
Photovoice Connecting Hilo and Kumamoto across the Ocean: A New Pedagogical Approach for Intercultural Understanding
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Hiroko Hara
This paper discusses digital storytelling through photographing with cellphones as an arts-based, culturally-responsive pedagogical approach. It aims to cultivate young people’s critical and creative thinking skills and foster intercultural understanding through art-making. Culturally-responsive pedagogy is very much needed for the realization of diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools. This study makes practical and theoretical contributions to the humanities. Practically, this research illustrates how to employ the arts, in particular photographing and pursue a photovoice project in the classroom as a culturally-responsive approach, which can inform similar praxis implementation in various school settings. Theoretically, this study advances our understanding of interculturality captured by cellphone cameras. From April to July 2023, a group of twelve university students in Kumamoto, Japan and the researcher collaborated for a photovoice project and explored the migratory movement of people from Kumamoto to Hilo on the Big Island. Starting in 1868, those from Kumamoto moved to the islands of Hawaiʻi, Kauaʻi, Maui, and Oʻahu, and they formed the second largest group of immigrants on the Big Island after those from Hiroshima. Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of “borderlands” was applied and a combination of open-ended surveys and interviews was conducted to evaluate the impact of digital storytelling on the students’ learning experience. It has become clear that photovoice enables the students to become critical and creative knowledge producers. Moreover, their photographs and stories uncover sustained intercultural connections between Hilo and Kumamoto. Hence, this new pedagogical approach is effective in tackling international migration and promoting intercultural understanding.
When I Put Out to Sea: Oceanic Imagery and the Fear of Death
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Anna Christensen
Water is necessary for life, but throughout many cultures and societies, it has also been symbolic of death. Many ancient philosophers, including the Stoics Seneca and Epictetus, portray death in terms of a sea voyage. Life is but a temporary harbor from the ocean of eternity – and into this ocean, we all must someday sail. The analogy between death and the ocean is impactful. Death, after all, is among the most terrifying things humans must face. Death is at once inevitable, uncertain, and unpredictable: that we will die is obvious. But we do not know when we will die. We also typically have very little control over our deaths. The ocean is similarly unknown and outside our control. We no more control the waves than we control our own mortality. Since we must all face the ocean of death sooner or later, finding a way to face the fear of death is essential. In this paper, I analyze the ancient Stoic imagery associated with the ocean as the passage from life. While this imagery illustrates how death is unpredictable and terrifying, I argue that it also provides one of ancient philosophy’s most effective consolations against the fear of death. It teaches us how to face what is unknown with courage and to make the most of our time in the harbor of life. By working through the Stoic imagery, I show how we can live a meaningful life despite the inevitable consequence of our mortality.
Journeying Through Aquatic Spaces: Water as a Transgressive Boundary and Its Mythological Inhabitants
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Eva Andrea Krannich
Over the last two decades, Indigenous and postcolonial novels portraying magical creatures that symbolize a close relationship with nature and the environment have gained popularity. Bodies of water and their inhabitants such as mermaid figures, water monsters, anthropomorphic octopodes, and other animals, often a remnant of mythology, are prominently featured in such contemporary speculative fiction. This paper comparatively analyzes journeys through time and space, during which the element water acts as a medium of transgressing the boundary between worlds and harboring creatures that enrich or endanger the protagonists’ travels. Furthermore, it encompasses culturally diverse literary landscapes with texts from the following three regions: North America, West Africa, and the Pacific Ocean. This cross-regional comparative approach highlights the global context of anthropogenic climate change, while it also gives insight into different literary traditions and how they can overlap through the thematic analysis of journeys in, through, and with water. The analysis focuses on the portrayal of these aquatic spaces and what function they fulfill, on the more-than-human entities that live within them, and the cultural importance of these magical and mythological figures for the three regions. Exemplary texts that will be discussed are the climate fantasy Weird Fishes (2022) by Portuguese-Hawaiian author Rae Mariz, the Indigenous futurist novel A Snake Falls to Earth (2021) by Lipan Apache author Darcie Little Badger, and the YA Trilogy The Nsibidi Scripts (2011-2023) by American-Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor.
