Blueish Entanglements and Transformations: Unfolding the Geographies of Wet Spaces and Their Role for Societal Change

This book explores blueish geographies: new ways of thinking with ‘wet’ space through a porous and open conceptualisation. Through critical ocean thinking, more-than-wet ontologies, blue humanities, blue economy and planning, the diverse chapters think of the blueish as an extension, relation, and representation of water, extending the field, and questioning its absences.

The book offers an original and interdisciplinary contribution to critical ocean and marine studies by expanding the ‘disciplines’ vocabularies, debates, possibilities, epistemologies, and methodologies. By bringing together diverse critical perspectives on wet spaces, politics, and their excesses, this book provides new conceptual and methodological tools for understanding temporalities and counter-archives, more-than-human ecologies and possible future plannings. Combining established and early-career scholars from different disciplines and regions, the volume advances current debates in critical geography and ocean studies while remaining accessible for teaching and other applied purposes.

Blueish Entanglements and Transformations is intended for scholars, researchers and students in the field of critical ocean geographies, more-than-human geographies, maritime studies, hydrosocial studies, blue humanities, blue economy, political ecology, and related water-focused disciplines. It should also appeal to non-research readers working on water-related policies, development, and planning.

Moritz Albrecht is Associate Professor of Environmental-Political Human Geography at the University of Eastern Finland. His research focuses on socio-spatial processes at the intersection between transnational sustainable policies and their economic and societal spheres of implementation. His current research particularly focuses on the assembling of novel blue (bio)economies such as seaweed or recirculating aquaculture systems, their spatial imaginaries, narratives, and forces of (re/de)territorialization.

Gabriella Palermo is Researcher in Geography at the Department Culture e Società of the University of Palermo, Italy. Her work focuses on critical ocean geographies and environmental/blue humanities, with a particular emphasis on Mediterranean Studies. In 2026, together with Giulia de Spuches, she founded the EHHP (Environmental Humanities Hub Palermo) within her department, where she serves as scientific coordinator.