Speaker: Laia Ventayol, Visiting PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Winnie Yee, MALCS Programme Coordinator, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, March 20, 2025
Time: 5:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: KK202, 2/F, K.K. Leung Building, Main Campus, HKU
The ultimate negotiations on the Law of the Sea took place from 1973 to 1982 in New York. Within the research group Ocean Crime Narratives (PI Marta Puxan-Oliva), based at the University of the Balearic Islands, we take an interdisciplinary perspective on ocean environmental harm and crime narratives emerging since this historical event. How do discourses in the cultural and scientific arenas jointly create conceptions, arguments and ideas underpinning current international policies and policy negotiations around environmental crime and harm at sea?
With a background in visual arts, my focus within the group is on materiality at sea. How is materiality framed in Western epistemology? Does object theory apply to plastic pollution? Is noise pollution seen as materiality at sea? Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi’s acclaimed 2011 work The Man with the Compound Eyes narrates a contemporary fiction around the Pacific Garbage Patch. Accompanying the novel, this talk relates to waste management research and ecology policy making in Hong Kong.
Laia Ventayol is a visiting PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Ventayol studied Fine Arts at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg in Germany and Comparative Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona. In constant tandem with her research, she works as a visual artist mostly between Spain and Germany. Among different acknowledgments, she participated in the 2022 International AIR Program at the Seoul Museum of Art.
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