About the Journal

Aims and scope

Blue Humanities is a diamond (non-fee charging) open access academic journal dedicated to water-based and water-centered interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and critical humanities scholarship. Blue Humanities offers a platform for innovative studies of oceans, seas, bays, deltas, marshes, rivers, canals, lakes, ponds, oases, glaciers, waterfalls, clouds, rain, snow, fog, ice, hurricanes, floods, and other aquatic spaces and hydro-phenomena.

Over the past two decades, there has been a growing realisation that human-environment entanglements have been under-researched, not just in the natural sciences, but also in the humanities. The flourishing of the environmental humanities, critical ocean studies, Anthropocene studies, and related fields has demonstrated just how much work remains to be done to get to grips with humanity’s relations with nature. This is perhaps especially true for the ocean, other aquatic spaces, and hydro-phenomena which (despite being absolutely central to human history, art, and existence itself) have often been at the margins of attempts to understand cultural and social formation, maintenance, transformation, and justice. The concept of the Blue Humanities draws together diverse fields, disciplines, and interdisciplines such as maritime studies, literary studies, art history, human geography, cultural anthropology, oceanography, history, ecology, geology, religious studies, philosophy, area studies, museum studies, gender studies, Indigenous studies, critical ethnic studies, diaspora studies, im/migration studies, critical refugee studies, environmental studies, ocean world studies, and global studies, to explore how humans and water/spaces/places/phenomena affect one another and/or create complex entanglements.

Mirroring developments in many other fields, the initial dominance of the Blue Humanities by (often critical and decolonial) scholarship emerging out of institutions in the USA is being challenged by new streams of Blue Humanities thinking. Scholars in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, Oceania, South America, and the Arctic, as well as scholars from communities who are more at the margins of globalized academic discourses, are contributing to the development of the Blue Humanities as a dynamic and epistemically diverse field.

With its editorial office in Hangzhou and its intellectual roots in Asia’s long tradition of thinking with water, the journal _Blue Humanities_ takes the field in new directions. Recognising that criticality can itself be epistemically limiting and colonially inflected, Blue Humanities is a radically open journal that publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship from across a range of intellectual positions.

Blue Humanities publishes peer reviewed research articles in a range of genres, styles, and forms. These papers may be more-or-less creative or standard in conception, method, and presentation. The journal also publishes creative and artistic work, interviews, and other non-peer reviewed content in its 'Engagements' section. 

Aims and scope

Publication model: Online open access
ISSN: Pending
Publication frequency: Biannual (January & July)
Launch date: 2027
Peer Review model: Double-blind external peer review
Indexed in: N/A
Acceptance rate: 35%
Licensing: CC BY 4.0
Publication fee: The journal charges no publication fees.

Institutional home and editorial office
Center for Caribbean Studies at Hangzhou Normal University