There is nothing I fancy more than returning to my favourite city in the world, and so to return next week for “Stories Come to Matter: Water, Food, and Other Entanglements” only doubles that delight.

Hosted by NICHE, the conference aims to enrich the discussion around the intricate interrelations between discourse and matter. Its goal is to highlight the values of stories and imagination and, in doing so, outline the vast network of agencies that dominate our material world. More specifically, it considers water and food as critical examples of how matters intertwine with meaning.

My presentation departs from Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel, Hot Milk, where the sun is always blazing. Sofia escorts her mother to Spain in search of a cure for paralysis. But the clinic also diagnoses Sofia's lack of courage and instructs her to steal a fish. At Almería’s market Sofia pokes the mouth of a monkfish and considers sardines and tuna before she slides a dorado into her basket. To steal a fish is the doctor’s prescription for acquiring boldness. Here she steals from the market, but what role does the sea itself—the water—play in this theft? What else might it mean to steal a fish and what worlds do fish story? In dialogue with my research about the intersections between cod and colonization, climate and crisis, "To Steal a Fish: Cod Tales and Colonial Knots" weaves together material, textual, and geographical fragments to tell global cod tales.