Kids and Blue Humanities: Critical Frameworks for a Blue Children’s Culture
Kids and Blue Humanities: Critical Frameworks for a Blue Children’s Culture [working title]
Edited by Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd, U of Florida.
Deadline for proposals: November 1, 2026, to both editors:
CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS
Part of the environmental humanities more broadly, Blue Humanities (BH) began to gain traction in the early twenty-first century, naming a constellation of topics and methods focused on human-water relationships. Blue Humanities scholarship puts water-based disciplines like oceanography and limnology in conversation with fields such as history, literature, philosophy, and classics. Key works include Steve Mentz’s At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009) and An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2024), Serpil Oppermann’s Blue Humanities (2023), Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020), Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures (2010), Exposed (2016), and The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life (2025). Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater (2020), and Sidney Dobrin’s Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative (2021), among others. These works don’t just approach water thematically; they attempt to think with and through water as material and metaphor and seek new methods for analysis and knowledge generation.
This edited collection spotlights the intersections of BH, children’s culture, and childhood studies, providing a theoretical architecture for an emerging conversation. Children’s literature and culture offers an abundance of material with which to think and dream, from early nautical exploration tales and Robinsonades to stories of marine animal encounters to modern and contemporary books, films, and television shows exploring aquatic activities, environments and concerns. While interested in narrative, this volume seeks to move beyond conventional textual analysis, or, perhaps to preempt familiar textual analysis by considering how literature and criticism might emerge within the newly surfaced spaces of Blue Humanities. Contributors are encouraged to focus on how BH and children’s culture might be mutually constitutive or illuminating. We are also interested in how BH and childhood studies might engage one another. How does BH help us rethink theories of childhood and approaches to childhood studies? In turn, we are interested in how BH might incorporate or think with childhood and children’s culture: what might a child-attentive practice of BH look like? Our goal is to build a critical framework or set of frameworks to invigorate dialogue between and among BH and children’s literature/culture as well as childhood studies. To achieve this, we invite contributions that employ cultural artifacts—spanning media, material and imagined spaces, and historical texts—not as analytical ends, but as entry points for broader arguments and explorations.
In addition, we seek contributions that examine how global youth cultures, especially Indigenous and/or coastal ones, are always already shaped by water contexts and concerns. We welcome chapters that consider how aquatic epistemologies can and do (re)shape youth culture and its study. More broadly, we want to know how aquatic materialities and fluid geographies disrupt terrestrial constructions of childhood.
Furthermore, because oceans simultaneously resist national/political boundaries and reshape local contexts, the volume prioritizes both trans-oceanic and local/Indigenous perspectives that challenge land-biased definitions of childhood and the environment. Contributors are encouraged to examine how the dynamic conditions of water disrupt static, earthy concepts of history and borders and territory, whether in coastal or landlocked cultures, whether in Indigenous or settler societies.
Possible topics
- Anthropocentrism, aquapocentrism, and zoöcentric frameworks
- Aquariums, aquariophily, and captive marine encounters
- Atmospheric water cycle
- Blue childhood studies, blue kids/youth
- Blue materialisms and the agency of water
- Climate change, sea-rise narratives, and solastalgia
- Coastal geographies and localized youth cultures
- Conservation ecologies, environmentalism, and activist rhetorics
- Decolonial currents and hydro-colonialism
- Ecohorror and aquahorror
- Extinction, multi-species ethics, and marine companion species
- Fish stories, shark tales, and cetacean rhetorics
- Fluid geographies and trans-oceanic migrations
- Geopolitics, hydro-politics, and environmental justice
- Global media franchises, theme parks, and eco-consumerism
- Historical maritime narratives, Robinsonades, and nautical exploration
- Hydro-humanities and the history of aquatic sciences
- Indigenous liquid ontologies and traditional ecological knowledge
- Informational architecture and blue media ecologies
- Keywords for blue youth studies
- Kids and/as water babies
- Leisure, sport, and coastal subcultures (e.g., surfing, sailing, diving)
- Mermaids, selkies, and hybrid aquatic figures
- Oceanic memory, trauma, and aqua-archival depths
- Philosophical, ethical, and legal approaches to water governance
- Plastic materialities, petrocultures, toys, and marine debris
- Queer ecologies, fluid identities, and trans-corporeality
- Representations of marine ecosystems and benthic life
- Slavery, forced labor, and middle passage legacies
- Submersion, saturation, and the optics of underwater media
- Water and religion, myth, and hydro-spirituality
- Water and/in science and institutional education
- Water materialities, blue infrastructures, and hydro-technologies
- Water parks, coastal recreation, and blue tourism
- Water puppetry and performative aquatic cultures
- Water-hospitable, invested, and saturated genres
Proposal Guidelines
350–500 word chapter proposals (or the equivalent) are due November 1, 2026. Proposals should be for original works not previously published and not currently under review elsewhere. If the chapter is accepted for the collection, a full draft (5,000–7,000 words) will be required by May 1, 2027. Editors are happy to discuss ideas prior to the deadline.
To submit a proposed chapter, please prepare the following:
Chapter Proposal: A 350–500 word abstract outlining the scope, argument, and theoretical framework of the proposed chapter.
Biographical Note: A 150–200 word brief biography for each author, including current institutional affiliation.
Contact Information: Full name, email address, and preferred professional title.
Submission Format: A single Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or PDF document, titled: [your name], Kids&BH Submission [date]
Email Subject Line: Submitted with the subject line "Proposal: Blue Humanities for Kids."
The editors encourage early career scholars and graduate students to submit.
The editors are particularly interested in receiving proposals from non-Western perspectives.