What are/ is the Blue Humanities? Towards a New Epistemic Horizon in the Study of Water, Politics, and Culture

Abstract

This article seeks to fill a clear gap in Arabic scholarship on the Blue Humanities, a field that has rapidly expanded and became increasingly institutionalized in Western academia over the past two decades. It represents one of the first academic texts in Arabic to offer a conceptual and theoretical introduction to this emerging field, beginning from a central question: how can the Blue Humanities reorient the study of water, politics, and culture in the Arab context? The study adopts a theoretical-conceptual methodology that combines a critical review of foundational scholarship in the field with an analysis of selected Arab examples as exploratory models rather than fully developed case studies. The field of the Blue Humanities reorients the humanities and social sciences toward water and oceans as central spaces for understanding history, culture, and politics. It begins by critiquing the dominance of land-based and nation-state frameworks in academic analysis and demonstrates how thinking through and with water enables new interpretations of the relationships between humans, environments, economies, and power. The article also outlines key theoretical frameworks that inform Blue Humanities, including posthumanism, wet ontologies, hydrofeminism, material ecocriticism, thinking with water, archipelagic thinking, and planetary thinking. It then explores the social and political applications of this field, addressing issues such as coastal communities and Indigenous knowledge, water justice, maritime geopolitics, and migration across seas. The study concludes by highlighting how this framework can contribute to rereading the Arab context through examples such as Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Red Sea. However, this study does not attempt to cover all dimensions of the Blue Humanities; rather, it offers an initial conceptual entry point that opens the door wide to further Arabic scholarship in this field, with the aim of advancing toward an “Arab Blue Humanities” that places water at the center of attention and enables a deeper understanding of all aspects of everyday life.