Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities
Routledge Environmental Humanities Series

Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities is an edited interdisciplinary collection that explores and analyses the field of the blue humanities through an Australian lens. The blue humanities is a way of understanding humanity?s relationship with water and manifestations of what is referred to as the ?blue? ? reefs, oceans, rivers, creeks, basins, and inland bodies of water.
Australia?s blue stretches from the world?s largest ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef, to the urban landscapes of metropolitan Australia. In its scope, this collection emphasises both the importance of the local and the interconnectedness of Australia with global environmental concerns. It considers ways in which the ?blue? manifests in Australian place and space and critiques how we conceptualise watery spaces and shades of blue in a country where water is often marked by its absence, its ephemerality, its politicisation and its dangers. Contributors from history, political science, English literature, creative arts, Indigenous knowledge, education and anthropology will tackle various entanglements between the human, the more-than-human and watery Australian spaces in modern culture.
It is the first volume to offer a specific, dedicated focus on the intersections between Australian blue space and the blue humanities. The collection offers a pathway for those wishing to explore, critique and advance ideas around the blue humanities in both research and teaching.
Directly addressing a growing interdisciplinary field, the critical essays will appeal to scholars, educators and students working across the humanities with an interest in the environmental humanities, ecopolitics, ecocriticism, the blue humanities, cultural geography, environmental history and the role of place.

Foreword (TBC)
Introduction – Maxine Newlands (James Cook University), Claire Hansen (The Australian National University)
Part 1: Placing Australian identities through the blue
1. Ecopolitics and ecocriticism: Activists, artisans and the Save the Reef campaign – Maxine Newlands (James Cook University)
2. Bad water: Shakespeare and Australia’s inland blue – Claire Hansen (The Australian National University)
3. Homesick blues: blue borderlines between personal history and brackish water – Mia McAuslan (James Cook University)
Part 2: Blue humanities beyond colonialism
4. A thinking, feeling, Blue Country: Healing with resistance and care – Vincent Backhaus (The Cairns Institute)
5. Colourblindness in/of place: Memory, colonial place and education’s ignorance of the blue – Bryan Smith (James Cook University)
6. ‘A Fellow-Denizen of the Deep’: Diving in the colonial undersea – Killian Quigley (The Australian Catholic University; Sydney Environment Institute)
Part 3: Hushed waters: the absence of the blue
7. Casting Pearls: Oceanic perspectives and critical regionalism in national literature – Victoria Kuttainen (James Cook University)
8. The watery history of Australia: How can the blue humanities inform the environmental histories of northern Australia? – Claire Brennan (James Cook University)
9. Australia’s ghost ports – Koen Stapelbroek (James Cook University)
Part 4: Beyond the anthropocentric blue: posthumanism and the more-than-human blue
10. Moving waters, muddy edges: Ibis in Brisbane – Gillian Paxton (The Cairns Institute)
11. Digital blues: Digital solastalgia and the human-nature connection in the context of Australian aquatic environments – Melusine Martin (Sorbonne University, Paris)
12. Old artefacts and the sea – Jasmin Guenther (Independent scholar)
Part 5: Imagining blue futures
13. Blue schools’ ethical imperatives – Helen Boon (James Cook University)
14. Reeling in disaster: Eco-art, science and a symbiotic method – Robyn Glade-Wright (James Cook University)
15. The ‘blue turn’ in contemporary art: Assembling blue methods of research – Peta Rake (University of Queensland Art Museum), Jacquie Chlanda (University of Queensland Art Museum), Léuli Eshraghi (University of Queensland Art Museum)
Conclusion (Maxine Newlands; Claire Hansen)
Afterword (TBC)
References

Maxine Newlands,(PhD), is Director of the Blue Humanities Lab in Australia, and holds two adjunct research fellowships with the University of Queensland and the Cairns Institute at James Cook University. Maxine’s research specialises in the advancement of novel science, in politics, policy, and marine governance.

Claire Hansen is a senior lecturer in English at the Australian National University (ANU). She is co-chair of the Blue Humanities Lab, the Heart of the Matter project, and the ANU Health Humanities Network. She is an award-winning educator, a researcher on the Shakespeare Reloaded project, co-editor of Reimagining Shakespeare Education (2023, Cambridge University Press), and author of Shakespeare and Place-Based Learning (2023, Cambridge University Press).