This panel brings together scholars across humanities exploring how human and non-human bodies, along with old and new media, engage with seawater across the Asia-Pacific Ocean. It interrogates widely circulating terms such as “Asia-Pacific,” “Ocean,” and “Blue Humanities.” Rather than quickly gesturing towards a reparative or prescriptive approach within neoliberal frameworks, the panel critically engages with the epistemological potential of alternative oceanic perspectives.

While the Blue Humanities has often been framed through American literature and early modern art history, as Steve Mentz discusses in An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023), this panel foregrounds the Asia-Pacific’s complex histories and water-based practices. This focus is particularly significant as oceanic studies continue to grapple with dominant Western frameworks in the Anglophone contexts. By prioritizing the Asia-Pacific, this panel expands the field’s geographical and conceptual scope. Building on the problematic set by Melody Jue’s concept of “terrestrial biases” in Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (2020) and Karin Amimoto Ingersoll’s as “seascape epistemology” in Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology (2016), this panel focuses on the Asia-Pacific Ocean, addressing various imperial/colonial legacies, Indigenous knowledge, and the role of media in shaping environmental discourses. This panel joins the foundational works on coral studies, including Melody Jue’s Coralations (2025), Michele Currie Navakas’s Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (2023), and Ann Elias’s Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity (2019), as well as studies on marine life in Stacy Alaimo’s The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep-Sea Life (2025) and Stefan Helmreich’s Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (2009), as well as aquatic cultures in Kevin Dawson’s Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (2018).

This panel features four individual presentations by early-career scholars based in Asia and North America that engage with interspecies communication, oceanic temporalities, and maritime infrastructures. Each presentation will be carefully timed with approximately 10 minutes long, ensuring that the session allows for at least 15 minutes of open discussion. This format, as an in-person setting, fosters active audience engagement, particularly around how these topics challenge dominant narratives of the Asia-Pacific Ocean and the Blue Humanities.

Tim Shao-Hung Teng (Chinese University of Hong Kong)’s “The Cetacean Media of Inscription: Interspecies Communication in Oceanic Taiwan” explores cultures of whale and dolphin watching in Taiwan, examining how interspecies communication technologies and practices reshape the understanding of oceanic media and environmental inscriptions.

Christine Xiong (Stanford University)’s “Ocean Salvage as Transpacific Method” looks at how the temporalities of the Pacific Ocean challenge conventional notions of “the Pacific Century.” Through multimedia art installations and literature, Xiong addresses how ocean salvage practices illuminate transpacific history, waste, and environmental futures.

Christina (Ting-Ting) Shiea (University of Washington)’s “Flows, In and Out: Water as Ecomedia at the Aquarium” examines aquariums in Taiwan and Japan as sites of convergent ecomedia, where the medium of water fosters connections between local and global aquatic environments, offering new insights into the Blue Humanities through material ecocriticism.

Hyeongjin Oh (Independent Scholar)’s “Vortices: How to See the Ocean’s Horizon on the Ship” analyzes two significant works in U.S. art history, Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage and Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, to shift Blue Humanities discourse from deep-sea imagery to oceanic surfaces and shipping infrastructures, challenging the romanticism of the ocean.

This panel brings together scholars from diverse geographical and disciplinary backgrounds working on the Asia-Pacific Ocean. The session includes perspectives from Taiwan, Japan, and the United States, incorporating voices from film and media studies, performance studies, science and technology studies, and art history. This diversity ensures a robust dialogue that broadens the scope of oceanic studies and strengthens interdisciplinary exchange. By fostering a transpacific dialogue, this panel contributes to the cultural, ecological, and historical dimensions of ocean studies while expanding conversations about the Blue Humanities beyond Western frameworks.