Deadline: 31st of July 2025
Contact: Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki
Email: bluehumanities2025@gmail.com

Editors
Nikoleta Zampaki, Postdoctoral Researcher, Faculty of Philology, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece & Adjunct Lecturer, Faculty of History, Archaeology and Cultural Resources Management, University of the Peloponnese, Greece

Helena Belchior-Rocha, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science and Public Policies and Researcher at CIES-ISCTE, University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal

Michael Briguglio, Associate Professor of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta, Malta

Peggy Karpouzou, Associate Professor of Theory of Literature, Faculty of Philology, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

Gaetano Sabato, Associate Professor of Geography, Department of Psychology, Educational Science and Human Movement, University of Palermo, Italy

Overview
Water has always inspired the human imagination through travel narratives, poetry, plays, songs, fiction, films and other media. However, it is only recently that water has become a critical focus of scholarship and research in the Humanities. The 21st century has witnessed a ‘blue turn’ in the Humanities, critically examining the planet’s troubled seas and distressed freshwaters across various fields such as literary and cultural studies (e.g., Neimanis, 2019; Dobrin, 2021; Mentz, 2020, 2022; 2023; Oppermann, 2023; Razeena P R and Sheeba M K, 2024), social and political studies (e.g., de Carvalho and Leira, 2022; Jones, 2024), spatial planning, architectural design, geography, and anthropology studies (e.g., Anderson and Peters, 2016; Brown and Peters, 2020).

The complex relationship between the human and non-humans in various blue environments and narratives raises a variety of questions, such as: What are the implications of shifting from a “green” to a “blue” perspective? How do blue (scientific and non-scientific) narratives work and what idea of nature emerges from them? What can representations of blue narratives as matter-in-transformation reveal about human and nonhuman corporeality and identity? How does ‘blue agency’ challenge ideas about the relationship between humans and nonhumans? What is the aesthetics of ‘blue materialisation’? What forms of alliance, both human and non-human, do cultural and other texts enable us to imagine in the face of an anthropocenic endgame? How do representations of coastal pollution, extractivism, or labor mediate environmental crisis? How does the ‘tragedy’ of the water commons intersect with issues of social justice, gender, and race?

The book aims to bring together scholars from a variety of research disciplines to explore blue studies. The key idea is to show how transdisciplinary topics are integrated into collective or institutional narratives, what function they perform, and how they operate in public discourses. Our intention is to demonstrate how blue narratives and the meanings they carry about water ecosystems influence the social system and its components, and how symbolic value is created within the cultural system of blue economies. In doing so, this volume will significantly contribute to the development of transdisciplinary dialogue between the Humanities and Natural Sciences, studying the context of the rapidly developing agenda of the Blue Humanities.

This project also represents a point of departure for filling this research gap by reevaluating the “blue turn” from the vantage point of various theoretical approaches and disciplines that undergird the Blue Humanities. This ‘turn’ manifests that ‘thinking as/with water’ is not only an approach but also a mode of seeking inspiration, creativity, and circulation between the life-forms within the wider ‘blue geographies.’

We welcome abstracts that (re)consider the role and significance of ‘blue’ (e.g., water, seas, oceans and so forth) in a great variety of research areas and disciplines. Possible topics may include but are not limited to the following:

– intersections of blue humanities with the environmental humanities, posthumanities, environmental digital humanities, ocean humanities, arctic/antarctic humanities, plant humanities, animal studies, medical humanities, energy humanities, public humanities, citizen humanities, and so forth

– blue humanities in -cene, e.g. Anthropocene, Symbiocene, Capitalocene, and so forth

– blue ecocriticism, blue poetics, storytelling of blue/aquatic imaginaries, queer blue ecologies, liquid modernity

– blue humanities and biosemiotics, material ecocriticism, empirical ecocriticism, degrowth maritime narratives, blue identities

– blue humanities in comparative and global literature, oceanic and Indigenous literature

– blue humanities in continental and global philosophy

– blue humanities in visual, media and film studies

– soundscape blue ecologies

– blue humanities in arts

– blue humanities and food studies

– ecotheological and ecopsychological approaches to blue humanities

– blue humanities and biopolitics

– blue humanities and environmental justice

– blue humanities and ecolinguistics

– blue humanities and rhetoric studies

– blue humanities and environmental history

– blue pedagogies

– blue humanities in social studies

– blue humanities in migration studies

– blue humanities and memory studies

– blue humanities in anthropology studies

– blue humanities in cultural and social geography studies

– blue humanities in political science

– blue humanities in marine sciences

– blue humanities in oceanography, climatology, meteorology, volcanology

– blue humanities in island and archipelagic studies

– blue humanities in arctic and antarctic studies

– blue humanities in mediterranean studies

– coastal methodologies on blue humanities

– blue humanities and diasporic communities

– blue humanities in architecture, design studies and biomimetics

– blue humanities in tourism studies

– blue humanities and urban studies (blue smart cities and citizenship)

– blue humanities and citizen science

– blue economy and business studies

– blue sustainable futures

– future matters in/of blue humanities

References
Anderson, Jon, and Kimberley Peters (2016). Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean. London and New York: Routledge.
Brown, Mike, and Kimberley Peters. (2020). Living with the Sea. Knowledge, Awareness and Action. New York and London: Routledge.
de Carvalho, Benjamin, and Halvard Leira. (2022). The Sea and International Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Dobrin, I. Sidney. (2021). Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative. New York and London: Routledge.
Jones, Reece (2024). “Political geography I: Blue geopolitics.” Progress in Human Geography 48.5, pp. 669-676.
Mentz, Steve (2020). Ocean. New York and London: Bloomsbury.
___ (2022). “Blue Humanities” In Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, pp. 1-20.
___ (2023). An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. New York and London: Routledge.
Neimanis, Astrida. (2019). Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. New York and London: Bloomsbury.
Oppermann, Serpil (2023). Blue Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Razeena P R, and Sheeba M K (2024). Towards ‘Bluer’ Humanities: Oceanic Meditations in Art, Literature and Culture. n.p.
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Instructions for Authors and Submissions
We call academics, senior and early-career researchers, post-graduate scholars and policy makers working on the proposed areas for the contributions to this volume. We also encourage proposing jointly authored chapters by international teams, especially combining (an) established scholar(s) with an early-career researcher(s). All submissions should be tailored towards an international audience.

The working language is English. Please send your topic’s title, abstract of 200-300 words including a short list of references, five keywords, short bio (100-200 words) including your ORCiD (if you have one), your full affiliation(s) and e-mail(s) in one Word document (.doc / .docx) at the e-mail bluehumanities2025@gmail.com until the 31st of July 2025 at the very latest. For any additional information or questions regarding the project, please contact the editors by emailing at bluehumanities2025@gmail.com.

Submissions that do not follow the above requirements will not be considered. Decisions will be communicated to authors by approximately 20th of August 2025. The edited collection is about to be published in a reputable press that has expressed interest in this project. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be invited to submit their full chapters (5,000-8,000 words including references) which will undergo a double peer review to reflect the quality standards. Being invited to submit a full chapter does not guarantee publication in the project, as acceptance is dependent on the double peer review.

More details and guidelines for the full chapters will be provided later. We are looking forward to receiving your material. Thank you!

Posted on July 25, 2025