The blue humanities, as it is infused with science and technology studies, is paradigmatic of environmentally oriented scholarship in the Anthropocene, which must reckon with epistemological problems of scale, onto-epistemologies of rapidly altering and utterly entangled lifeworlds, and the urgency of extinction.

Stacy Alaimo

Throughout my career I have always looked at the ground. Everything I have studied, everything that has caught my attention, has always been inland. In hospitals in Madrid or in Maryland, it doesn’t matter. Always many miles from the coast.

Meanwhile, I had a deep nostalgia for the sea. A nostalgia that had grown during my childhood, when I would listen to a cassette of a dramatised version of Moby Dick in my room, in a city that was also inland, where my father’s work had taken us. The whistling of the seagulls, the wind in the sails, the roar of the storm, the terrible end of the Pequod, engulfed by the ocean… all served to fill my ears and my mind with the sea.

It was three years ago that I decided to turn my research around to match my passion for the ocean. The result is this blue turn that has informed the creation of ehCOLAB and my latest research projects, which focus on our relationship with the sea.