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‘Waters, marine cultural heritages, and climate justice in Asia and Asian diasporas’

In Asia and in Asian diasporic contexts, different kinds of water, as well as marine cultural heritage(s) can play a central role in various geographic and cultural contexts. Here, marine cultural heritage includes things like boats, boatbuilding, sailing, diving, surfing, swimming, fishing and other sea-based food gathering, as well as eco/marine-based activism, among other everyday practices. In East Asia and in East Asian diasporic contexts, for example, in Daoism and Buddhism, water serves as a metaphor for everyday practices of stillness, mindfulness, flow, and/or social impacts (e.g., ‘ripple effects’.) Or, in Southeast Asia, for example in the Philippines, boats can serve as a primary metaphor, aesthetic, and material reality for indigenous identities and collectivities—for example, among Tagalogs, Visayans, Badjao, and others—as well as kinship/clan/community relations, gender formations, death, the afterlife, ancestors, decolonial resistance, and as an important site for the Filipinx global diaspora (e.g., seafarers/seamen working in global shipping.) Island, coastal, riverine, estuary, etc. locales and sites in many regions of Asia are also some of the most vulnerable places in the current local/global climate crisis. For example, we might think about major floods in Manila or Dhaka, among other locations, or how Super Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan impacted and destroyed parts of the Philippines, Vietnam, South China, and Taiwan (as well as Guam and the Caroline Islands.) At the same time, in Asia and in Asian diasporic locations, there are also strong local climate justice movements. New Orleans, Louisiana (USA) and the Vietnamese American and Filipinx communities there come to mind, to give one example.

For the inaugural issue of Blue Humanities, we seek to highlight papers rooted in or routed through water-based or water-centered interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and/or critical humanities scholarship, as well as research on heterogeneous marine cultural heritages and climate justice in various regions of Asia and/or in Asian diasporic contexts. While the ‘Blue Humanities’ was coined and founded in the context of the US east coast and the Atlantic region, for example, through the work of John Gillis and Steve Mentz, we seek to add to, strengthen, complicate, and/or confront the established field of Blue Humanities by featuring the work of scholars, researchers, activists, and artists working in Asia and/or in Asian diasporic contexts.

Possible paper topics:
• Water(s), marine cultural heritage(s), and/or climate justice in diverse Asian/Asian diasporic cinemas, filmmaking, photography, fiction, poetry, and visual arts;
• Indigenous approaches to water(s), marine cultural heritage(s), and/or climate justice in Asia and/or Asian diasporic contexts;
• Asian/Asian diasporic femme-inist and feminist approaches to water(s), marine cultural heritages, and climate justice;
• Queer and trans* ecologies and LGBTQ/sexual minorities’ studies and/or approaches to water, marine cultural heritage(s), and climate justice in Asia and/or Asian diasporic contexts;
• Asian diasporic refugee/immigrant displacement/resettlement/unsettling and their connections to water(s), marine cultural heritage(s), and climate justice;
• Museum studies of water(s), marine cultural heritage(s), and climate justice in Asian/Asian diasporic contexts;
• Water-based place-making and community-building in Asia and/or Asian diasporic contexts;
• Sea-based/water-based militarization and/or de-militarization in Asian and/or Asian diasporic contexts;
• Seafaring, other water-based travel or mobilities, plus choke-points, ports, port cities, boats and ships in Asian and/or Asian diasporic contexts;
• Marine animal/animality studies in Asia and/or Asian diasporic contexts;
• (Global) South-South or other generative and historically marginalized transwaters approaches and connections as they apply to water, marine cultural heritage(s), and climate justice.

We are also interested in auto-theory, autoethnography, creative-critical experimental writing, photo-essays and ‘image + text’ works related to waters, marine cultural heritage(s), and/or climate justice in Asia and Asian diasporic contexts.

We hope to publish this special section in the May 2026 issue of Blue Humanities, a non-fee charging open access journal. Interested contributors should submit their papers via the journal’s online submission system by 31 October 2025. They should include a cover letter with their submission that specifies that the paper is intended for the special section on ‘Waters, marine cultural heritages, and climate justice in Asia and Asian diasporas’. All papers will be subject to peer review and must follow submission guidelines for authors: https://www.bluehumanitiesjournal.org/for-authors.

If you have any questions regarding the special section themes and suitability, please contact co-Editor-in-Chief Dr. Kale Bantigue Fajardo (kfajardo@umn.edu) for details. If you have any questions regarding the peer review or publication process, please contact Managing Editor Dr David Struthers (theecstasyofhistory@gmail.com.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Bénédicte Meillon (5 mai 2026). ‘Waters, marine cultural heritages, and climate justice in Asia and Asian diasporas’. Écopoétique. Consulté le 13 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/166at


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