Making the Invisible Visible: How the Blue Humanities Translate Climate Change to the Public

Abstract I’ve long reflected on how our work in the Blue Humanities (an interdisciplinary water-centric approach) can reach broader audiences, so it becomes meaningful and impactful, rather than buried in academic silos. Water, after all, is universally captivating. It resonates across age groups, cultures, professions, and disciplines. This article examines how the Blue Humanities can advance the Global Public Literary Humanities by engaging broader audiences in urgent conversations about climate change. At a time when the climate crisis demands cross-disciplinary and public engagement, the Blue Humanities offers a unique framework that bridges two persistent gaps: the divide between scientific and humanistic knowledge, and the disconnect between expert science and public understanding. At its core, the climate crisis is not a crisis of information; it is a crisis of imagination and communication between the humanities and sciences, as well as between science and the public. Drawing on my experience of teaching the Blue Humanities and using Twitter/X as a platform for public engagement, I explore how narrative tools—such as short fiction, film adaptation, video games, and social media—serve as effective Public Humanities media. These platforms evoke affect, ethical reflection, ecological awareness, and action by translating specialized climate knowledge into shared cultural narratives. They make the invisible climate change visible. By synthesizing blue, public, global, and literary humanities, I argue that narrative forms—whether textual, visual, or digital—can help build a civically engaged, media-diverse literary public capable of confronting the planetary challenges of our oceanic and climate futures.