Blue Humanities

Serpil Oppermann

Related terms: thalassology, tidalectics, hydrocriticism, hydrofeminism, aquatic, waterscapes, limnology, oceanography, fluid poetics, oceanic turn, wet-matter

As a transdisciplinary field, the Blue Humanities explores human-water interactions through socio-cultural, literary, historical, ethical, theoretical, and ecological perspectives, while also engaging with related scientific data on oceanic and limnological systems. The term Blue Humanities is attributed to Steve Mentz, who, in his 2009 essay “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature,” suggested a maritime-centered approach in cultural studies. Here, ‘blue’ signifies a fluid material-symbolic presence that challenges the dominance of ‘green’ within the Environmental Humanities influenced by the greening of literary and cultural studies. ‘Blue’ also destabilizes land-based epistemologies and theories, which have inadvertently projected a homogenized image of naturecultures confined to terrestrial spaces. The distinction between terrestrial and hydrological imaginaries lies in their treatments of space and temporality, constituting a contest over epistemic regimes that govern movement, settlement, and belonging. While terrestrial logic centers on fixity and cartographic certainty, hydrological approaches privilege fluidity, mobility, and how water does not adhere to any fixable boundaries, as exemplified by rivers, oceans, and atmospheric currents that transcend national borders. Scholars like Rachel Price, Hester Blum, and Craig Santos Perez argue that this approach challenges the territoriality underpinning most terrestrial paradigms, instead foregrounding liquid relationalities that refuse simple placement. Santos Perez proclaims that the “theoretical currents of the Blue Humanities have shaped [his] transoceanic methodology” and credits its scholars with demonstrating “how the ocean shapes human knowledge, experiences, histories, politics, economies, cultures, and identities.” (2020, 2). Michael Blackstock, a Canadian First Nation author, further emphasizes that “[a]s the rivers of human knowledge flow across the world’s landscapes, a diversity of cultural tributaries interweaves, streaming with their enhancing qualities of clarity, flow, and experiences” (2023, 8). These interconnected flows echo the struggles of Indigenous water protectors, such as those opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, who resist anthropocentric epistemologies through their environmental activism. 

The incorporation of water-based knowledge into predominantly land-based epistemological frameworks precipitates a new epistemic configuration, which Hawaiian scholar Karin Amimoto Ingersoll defines as “the fluvial addition to the territorial” within a new seascape epistemology that “splash[es] alternatives onto the Western-dominant and linear mindset that has led the world toward realities of mass industrialization as well as cultural and individual assimilation” (2023, 38). In the Blue Humanities, Animoto’s concept of “seascape epistemology” extends beyond oceanic paradigms to encompass freshwater ecosystems, emphasizing the common threats facing both salt and freshwater systems.

As a field, the Blue Humanities integrates research on deep-sea ecologies, ocean acidification, coral bleaching, melting glaciers, dwindling fish populations, and other aquatic crises into critical humanistic discourse. It reorients scholarship towards fluid epistemologies, embracing a water-oriented ontology and cultural imaginaries. In its language of flow, the Blue Humanities invites reflection on our impermanence, urging us to see ourselves as transient inhabitants of a world defined by flux. It dissolves the legacy of anthropocentric ideologies, instituting new discourses attuned to aquatic processes and agencies.

The Blue Humanities initially emerged through an ‘oceanic turn’ in literary and cultural studies – variously termed ‘critical ocean studies’ and ‘humanist oceanic studies.’ Despite its “distinctly saline focus to date” (Campbell and Paye 2020, 1), it advances a broader rethinking of human-water relations, encompassing fluvial, lacustrine, and even atmospheric hydrologies that challenge the primacy of maritime frameworks. This broader hydrological turn allows for a more nuanced understanding of human-water interactions, from Indigenous aquifer epistemologies to the cultural imaginaries of monsoon ecologies. The field now elucidates how freshwater bodies, from rivers to subterranean aquifers, contribute to fluid epistemologies that remain underexplored in dominant oceanic discourses. It also explores how non-oceanic waterscapes contribute to the planetary hydrocommons, addressing pressing issues like disappearing glaciers, dammed rivers, and poisoned wells. It also raises questions about how water in its various states – solid, liquid, vapour – disrupts terracentric spatial and temporal scales, prompting a reconsideration of hydro-material entanglements across disciplines.

As a concept, ‘blue humanities’ opens a space for reimagining meanings, values, and power dynamics that shape human-water interactions in their historical continuities and transformations. Rather than prescribing a singular approach, it remains dynamically open-ended, adapting to shifting ecological, cultural, and discursive currents  The entanglements of narratives, epistemologies, and material realities of water are central to reconfiguring humanistic inquiry and conventional understandings of agency in hydrosocial relations. Water itself exerts agency, as exemplified by the Mekong River’s seasonal floods shaping agricultural and political dynamics. As a conceptual framework, ‘blue humanities’ invites interdisciplinary dialogues that span literature, philosophy, history, and environmental sciences, enabling a more capacious engagement with the lived experiences, aesthetic expressions, and political struggles of waterscapes across time and place. The cultural significance of oceanic spaces in postcolonial contexts, as examined by DeLoughrey (2017), and the exploration of human-nature relationships in maritime settings, as discussed by Rachel Price (2017), highlight the impacts of aquatic environments on Indigenous communities. The political dimensions of freshwater governance, as analyzed by environmental scientists, also epitomize the significance of this framework. Noting that “freshwater flora and fauna receive relatively little attention compared to their terrestrial and marine counterparts,” scientists Kim Birnie-Gauvin and co-authors argue that freshwaters are underrepresented and “viewed as a resource to be exploited or simply seen as a component of the terrestrial landscape” (Birnie-Gauvin, et al., 2023, 3; 5). Therefore, their biodiversity needs must be integrated into terrestrial conservation efforts. Melissa M. Rohde, Mark Reynold and Jeanette Howard propose solutions through what they term "dynamic management to achieve multi-benefits and flexibly respond to our water challenges” (2020, 2). Both studies critique the utilitarian view of freshwater as a mere resource, aligning with the Blue Humanities’ reframing of all water bodies as sites of human-nonhuman entanglements. Their call to integrate freshwater conservation into broader terrestrial policies echoes the field’s critique of land-based epistemologies that marginalize aquatic ecologies, paralleling its commitment to multispecies justice by recognizing rivers, lakes, and wetlands as spaces of interwoven histories shaped by historical and political forces. Drawing on such scientific insights as the empirical foundation for its theoretical and ethical arguments, the Blue Humanities emerges as a crucial concept and field for tackling environmental issues through transdisciplinary dialogues between scientists and humanists. Resisting the impulse to see water solely through the lens of terrestrial paradigms on a planet of terraqueous biodiversity, promotes a fluid ontology that affirms water’s agency, narrative potential, and role in shaping cultural imaginaries.

Steve Mentz’s work (2023) exemplifies this approach, highlighting the need for adaptive conservation strategies that account for water’s physical and cultural instabilities and narratives shaping its governance. Melody Jue’s insights (2020) into media ecologies are also important in demonstrating water as an epistemically distinct environment that mediates cultural, ecological, and technological interactions. Equally important is Hester Blum’s work (2008) on oceanic literacy, where her analysis of the sea’s literary representations reveals how literature shapes our understanding of the ocean – an approach that can also be extended to freshwater environments. My exploration of waterscapes accentuates their narrative dimensions, presenting them as storied waters that offer a “liberating challenge to... conventional sea discourse” (2023, 7). As Stacy Alaimo observes, “the blue humanities... may contribute to the urgent project of tracing, assembling, critiquing, and conceptualizing ways of knowing aquatic multispecies environments” (2020, 312-13). These perspectives present a framework to re-imagine human-water relations beyond instrumentalist ideologies. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, however, questions the utility of the term “blue humanities,” criticizing it as a concept repackaged to fit the current market demands of academia. She argues that “[i]t is the product of the neo-liberalization of academia and the rebranding of the humanities in an era of intellectual and economic downsizing” (2023, 145) and prefers the term ‘Critical Ocean Studies.’

While DeLoughrey’s concerns about academia’s commercialization and institutionalization are valid, the Blue Humanities should not be reduced to a mere rebranding effort. The potential risks of commodifying and institutionalizing a concept meant to challenge dominant paradigms do not negate its value; rather, they ensure it remains a dynamic, critical tool for reimagining the human-water relationships. By remaining open, the Blue Humanities transcends the confines of neoliberalism and its pitfalls, pushing for socio-cultural, ecological, and political transformations. The field’s multidisciplinarity and expansive scope allow it to confront aquatic troubles in ways that Critical Ocean Studies alone cannot, offering an inclusive framework that engages with the full spectrum of water crises, from sea-level rise and deoxygenation to climate-induced freshwater scarcity. The Blue Humanities is, thus, a transformative discourse with revisionary knowledge that facilitates thinking with both salt and fresh water. As Mentz observes, "[t]he aims of watery criticism... include both describing the complex workings of water and imagining ways to change our relationships to it” (2023, 1). This is precisely what the Blue Humanities seeks to accomplish in aquatic dynamics.

The term ‘blue humanities,’ functions not as a fixed category but as an evolving conceptual paradigm that informs and inspires diverse approaches to environmental futures. It shifts perspectives beyond geopolitical water boundaries, promoting transboundary water governance focused on shared ecological responsibility and fluidity. This fluidity is especially pertinent to climate-induced displacement in deltaic regions, contested Arctic sovereignty amid melting ice, and refugee crises in the Mediterranean. Scientific assessments of sea-level rise, ocean deoxygenation, and marine ecosystem degradation further expand critical discourses on extractivism and hydrocolonialism. When capitalist systems commodify planetary waterscapes, disputes over water bodies and freshwater resources intensify – seen in tensions between Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile and struggles between the U.S. and Mexico over the Colorado River’s dwindling allocations – both underscoring the urgency of hydrocentric governance. Similarly, rising seas complicate territorial claims, from contested Pacific sovereignty in Tuvalu and Kiribati to shifting Arctic geopolitics as melting ice reveals new resource-rich seabeds, challenging conventional legal frameworks. Deep-sea mining further entangles these dynamics, as seen in the controversial extraction of polymetallic nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which threatens deep-sea biodiversity. But as geopolitical boundaries blur with climate change, more-than-human perspectives spill over into water conflicts, with water’s fluidity disrupting human demarcations and prompting a rethinking of global histories and ecological futures. Water unsettles rigid human exceptionalism, challenging the mastering visions of reality that influence collective social memory and cultural imaginaries of planetary waterscapes. Typically framed through anthropocentric legal and economic structures, these conflicts take on new dimensions when viewed through hydrocentric ethics, multispecies justice, and hydrofeminist perspectives that link water to gender and social justice, alongside Indigenous epistemologies that recognize water as a living entity with intrinsic rights and cultural significance. This is evident in the legal recognition of rivers as entities with rights, as seen in New Zealand’s Whanganui River, Ecuador’s constitutional recognition of Vilcabamba River’s rights, and Colombia’s protection and restoration of the Atrato River to safeguard ecological integrity and dependent communities. This emphasis on more-than-human perspectives offers a framework for rethinking legal and ethical accountability amid planetary transformations.

Building on these perspectives, the Blue Humanities reconceptualizes governance by replacing fixity with fluidity and recognizes the necessity of new legal and ethical frameworks. The recognition of water as a dynamic agency that transcends human-imposed boundaries calls for governance models that are adaptable, inclusive, and responsive to ecological complexities. Such models emphasize relationality within aquatic ecosystems, promoting relational thinking – or thinking with water – “as theories based on notions of fluidity, viscosity, and porosity reveal,” acknowledging that “water is a matter of relation and connection” (Chen, MacLeod, Neimanis 2013, 12). This perspective enables better cultural and social cognizance of water bodies’ precarity. Ultimately, as a term, ‘blue humanities’ points to a more equitable and sustainable paradigm for managing shared waterscapes, one that honours the voices and rights of both human and nonhuman entities.

Artistic interventions play a vital role in this endeavour, rendering watery environments perceptible in new ways through visual, sonic, and performative expressions. They unsettle dominant narratives, expose hidden ecologies, and open imaginative pathways for rethinking human engagements with aquatic worlds. For instance, Roni Horn’s 1999 photographic series Still Water (The River Thames, For Example) challenges fixed perceptions of rivers by juxtaposing textual reflections with images of the Thames’ shifting surface. Jana Winderen’s hydroacoustic compositions, including Listening Through the Dead Zones (2014), amplify the often-invisible sonic ecologies of marine environments, making audible the impact of human activity on underwater life. Stefanie Hessler’s curatorial project Tidalectics (2018) challenges terrestrial biases by embracing the ocean’s fluidity as a conceptual and methodological framework. Inspired by Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of ‘tidalectics’ – a rhythmic, non-linear way of understanding history through oceanic tides – the project brings together artists, theorists, and scientists to reconsider how tidalectic thinking can inform politics, aesthetics, and ecological futures. Reflecting water’s cyclical and recursive nature, ‘tidalectics’ offers a critical lens for rethinking colonial legacies, migrations, and environmental changes beyond fixed boundaries and hierarchical structures. It highlights multispecies entanglements and oceanic materialities, from sculptural engagements with seawater to eco-sculptural evocations of marine life. The generative uncertainty of watery worlds reorients perspectives toward the ocean’s shifting temporalities and transcorporeal flows.

A similar fusion of art, science, and environmental activism is seen in Margaret and Christine Wertheim’s Crochet Coral Reef project (2005–present), which visualizes the fragility of marine ecosystems through a collaborative art practice. Drawing on hyperbolic geometry, a mathematical form found in coral structures, the project features hand-crocheted coral formations that mimic reef ecosystems, highlighting the impacts of climate change, ocean acidification, and coral bleaching. It demonstrates how art can transform scientific knowledge into affective, visually compelling forms, emphasizing embodied engagement in ecological awareness through alternative methods of knowledge production.

Equally attuned to oceanic entanglements is Mer Meggie Roberts’ Becoming Octopus Meditations – a series of online videos created for IMT Gallery London’s digital exhibitions. Engaging with cephalopod cognition, Roberts draws on scientific research into octopus intelligence, particularly their decentralized nervous system, adaptive camouflage, and dynamic embodiment, to create a speculative, meditative audiovisual experience. Through fluid visuals and rhythmic narration, Becoming Octopus Meditations invites viewers into a sensory world shaped by distributed intelligence and the liminal boundaries between human and nonhuman consciousness. The octopus symbolizes radical otherness and adaptability, opening speculative imaginaries of multispecies cohabitation.

Transforming marine science into a shared cultural experience and emphasizing the urgency of ocean conservation, these art projects exemplify interdisciplinary dialogues within the Blue Humanities. They provide critical insights into the entanglements of climate change, biodiversity loss, and neo-liberal economies, reflecting the ongoing transformations of watery worlds in the Anthropocene. Aiming to dismantle the anthropocentric blueprints in economic, legal, and cultural narratives of control, these works promote collaborative relationships with aquatic environments in the pursuit of more sustainable futures.

As demonstrated, Blue Humanities, both as a creative term and an academic field, generates alternative visions of environmental futures through transdisciplinary practices. With its evolving meanings, cultural formations, and ethical imperatives, it shapes human-water interactions through fluid transformations and enduring continuities, becoming a vital concept for future environmental thought and practice.

References

Alaimo, Stacy. 2020. “Afterword: Adequate Imaginaries for Anthropocene Seas.” In Blue Legalities: The Life and Laws of the Sea, edited by Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson.  311-324. Durham: Duke University Press.

Birnie-Gauvin, Kim. et al. 2023, “The RACE for freshwater biodiversity: Essential actions to create the social context for meaningful conservation.” Conservation Science and Practice 5 (4): 1-18.

Blackstock, Michael. 2010/2023. Oceaness: Blue Ecology Edition. Blue Ecology Institute Foundation.

Blum, Hester. 2008. The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American  Sea Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

Cambell, Alexandra and Michael Paye 2020. “Water Enclosure and World-Literature: New Perspectives on Hydro-Power and World-Ecology.”  Humanities 9 (106): 1-15.

Chen, Cecilia, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, eds. 2013. Thinking with Water. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2017. “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene.” Comparative Literature 69(1): 32-44.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2023. “Mining the Seas: Speculative Fictions and Futures.” In: Laws of the Sea: Interdisciplinary Currents, edited by Irus Braverman. 145-163. New York: Routledge.

Hessler, Stefanie. 2018. Tidalectics. Exhibition. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21)–Academy. TBA21–Augarten, Vienna. https://tba21.org/tidalectics-catalog

Horn, Roni. 1999. Still Water (The River Thames, For Example). Photographic Series.

Ingersoll, Karin Amimoto. 2023. “Seascape Epistemology: An Embodied Knowledge.” In Postcolonial Oceans: Contradictions, Heterogeneities, Knowledges, Materialities, edited by Sukla Chatterjee, Joanna Chojnicka, Anna-Katharina Hornidge, and Kerstin Knopf, 37-52. Heidelberg University Publishing.

Jue, Melody. 2020. Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mentz, Steve. 2009. “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature.” Literature Compass 6 (5): 997-1013. 

Mentz, Steve. 2023. An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. New York: Routledge.

Oppermann, Serpil. 2023. Blue Humanities: Storied Waterscapes in the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Perez, Craig Santos. 2020. “The Ocean in Us”: Navigating the Blue Humanities and Diasporic Chamoru Poetry.” Humanities 9 (3.66): 1-11.

Price, Rachel. 2017. “Afterword: The Last Universal Commons.” Comparative Literature 69(1): 45-53.

Roberts, Mer Meggie. 2020. The Becoming Octopus Meditations [1-8] Arts Council England. 0(rphan)d(rift>) archive.

Rohde, Melissa M., Mark Reynold and Jeanette Howard. 2019. “Dynamic multibenefit solutions for global water challenges.” Conservation Science and Practice 2(1):1-8

Wertheim, Margaret and Christine Wertheim. 2005-Present. Science+Art Project: Crochet Coral Reef. Ongoing Project.

Winderen, Jana. 2014. Listening Through the Dead Zones. Hydroacoustic Compositions.