the collective : Our Future aims
Our project complements and extends efforts to think other axes and practices for the comparative study of deserts, and aims to open new pathways for south-south, multilingual, and transnational intellectual exchange. We hope that our approach to desert studies will illuminate connections that have been overlooked or ignored either due to the assumption that all deserts are equally alienating and empty, or because of the geographical distances between deserts.
In particular, our approach draws from and supplements Oceanic Studies. Oceanic Studies has created an alternative means to trace global networks and flows; it has offered novel, connective terms for comparative literary studies and comparative historiographies; it has reframed important conversations about the increasingly urgent competition for water and water access.
A series of key terms, protocols and questions developed under the rubric of ‘Comparative Desert Studies’ will generate a distinctively invigorating framework for reconceptualizing comparative methodologies in a number of disciplines, and will create avenues to rethink dominant frameworks that presently organize literary and cultural studies more broadly.