Description: By drawing on oceanography (marine sciences) and limnology (freshwater sciences), social sciences, and the environmental humanities, the field of the blue humanities critically examines the planet's troubled seas and distressed freshwaters from various socio-cultural, literary, historical, aesthetic, ethical, and theoretical perspectives. Since all waterscapes in the Anthropocene are overexploited and endangered sites, the field calls for transdisciplinary cooperation and encourages thinking with water and thinking together beyond the conventions of tentacular anthropocentric thought. Working across many disciplines, the blue humanities, then, challenges the cultural primacy of standard sea and freshwater narratives and promotes disanthropocentric discourses about water ecologies. Engaging with the most pressing water problems, this Element contributes to those new discursive practices from a material ecocritical perspective. The authors' hypothesis is that fluid-storied matter and the new stories we tell can change the game by changing our mindset.
Review Quotes: 'Dripping with erudition, wet with insight, and soaked with common sense, this is a book that anyone in the Environmental Humanities needs to read. Serpil Oppermann brings together materials from an enormous ocean and compresses it into pearls. In so doing, Oppermann provides data that compellingly and convincingly reveal the importance of salt and fresh water narratives for our past, present, and future. Arguing from a perspective that is often very local, Oppermann's discussions bear fundamentally on important global issues - indeed, the most important issues we face today.' Simon C. Estok, Sungkyunkwan University