By Aylin Krieger
02 Jul 2026
Ocean Literacy in times of ocean crisis
Oceans are central to life on Earth. At the same time, they are under growing pressure from plastic pollution, toxic contamination, eutrophication, overfishing, by-catch, damage to the ocean floor, melting polar ice, rising sea levels, and the prospect of deep-sea mining. These challenges are not only ecological or technical. They are also cultural, historical, political, economic, and social.
This is the starting point for the Blue Humanities. The field explores how societies understand, narrate, value, exploit, remember, and protect the sea. It brings together perspectives from literary and cultural studies, museum studies, history, anthropology, geography, philosophy, media studies, critical marine studies, environmental studies, and maritime economy.
At the symposium, researchers from across Europe, Turkey, North America, South Africa, Taiwan, and the Pacific region discussed how different forms of ocean knowledge can be brought into conversation. The focus was on Ocean Literacy: a broader understanding of oceans and human-ocean relations. This includes scientific knowledge, but also experience-based, local, Indigenous, historical, artistic, and object-based forms of knowledge.
The discussions covered ocean-related values and knowledge, media and performances, practices and forms, histories and archives, as well as infrastructures and politics. Topics ranged from deep-sea mining, overfishing, oceans and empire, hydrobodies, queer oceans, work at sea, military use, and extraction to multispecies relations, emotional connections, heritage, teaching, care, protection, consciousness, and responsibility.
From exchange to a future network
The three-day programme moved from shared orientation to concrete network-building. It opened at the German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History in Bremerhaven, where guided tours introduced participants to maritime history, museum collections, object-based research, and current debates on oceans.
On the second day, the symposium continued at Forum am Domshof in Bremen. Short impulse presentations gave participants an overview of the research, methods, and perspectives represented in the future network.
The final day was designed as a workshop. Participants developed network themes and began forming working groups for the planned COST Action application. These groups started to define their topics, objectives, tasks, and deliverables. In this way, the symposium went beyond academic exchange and created concrete structures for future cooperation.
UBRA as a catalyst for Bremen cooperation
The symposium also highlighted the particular strength of Bremen and Bremerhaven as a science location. The cooperation between the University of Bremen, the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT), and the German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History brought together perspectives that are rarely combined in one research setting.
The University of Bremen contributed expertise from literary and cultural studies. The Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research added oceanographic, economic, and sustainability-oriented perspectives. The German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History brought in historical, archival, museum-based, and object-related expertise.
This combination shaped the symposium. It also reflected the core idea behind the planned network: future ocean challenges require cooperation across disciplines, institutions, regions, and knowledge cultures.
For the U Bremen Research Alliance, the event showed what cross-institutional cooperation can achieve. UBRA creates spaces in which the University of Bremen and non-university research institutions combine their strengths, develop shared agendas, and address major societal challenges together.
COST Action application
One central aim of the symposium was to further develop the research idea “Ocean Literacy – Literatures of Oceans” for an EU-funded COST Action network application. The future network will focus on ocean literacies and diverse forms of ocean knowledge. It will examine how this knowledge is produced, represented, translated, shared, and contested, and how literature, media, archives, museum objects, education, and public communication can contribute to more sustainable human-ocean relations.
“The UBRA symposium was a highly productive and intensive workshop. It gave researchers in the future Blue Humanities network the opportunity to get to know one another, learn about each other’s research, and build lasting connections. Most importantly, we jointly developed strategies for Ocean Literacy and for building knowledge about oceans within the framework of the UN Ocean Decade. This work is to be continued in a future COST Action network,” said Prof. Dr. Kerstin Knopf.
The symposium made clear that understanding oceans requires more than data alone. It also requires stories, histories, objects, values, practices, and shared responsibility. By supporting this exchange, the U Bremen Research Alliance helped turn an emerging international research field into a concrete working network, strengthening Bremen’s role as a place where global questions are addressed through cooperation.
