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.

This article addresses the potentials and shortcomings of prominent current attempts to articulate platforms for public literary humanities. While the pressing polycrises of the twenty-first century call for a resurgence of committed literature—and, accordingly, a public-facing critical practice and ethics—a scenario for public literary humanities still remains to be scripted. We argue that the vagueness of the term “literary value” is one crucial obstacle in this context. It weakens the opposition to literature’s commercialisation and in fact tends to lead to an unproductive reiteration of traditional, canon-bound conceptions of what “good” literature is. We perceive a similarly weak definition of “value” in the public humanities at large, but find in Judith Butler’s encouragement to trust in extra-academic publics a promising perspective that we deem applicable to a budding public literary humanities as well. Drawing on historical (Bertolt Brecht) and current (Vinod Kumar Shukla) examples, we are able to show that such a literary and critical practice can only be conceived when the established notion of literature as private and solipsistic is overcome.

This essay makes a case for the crucial role of performance in higher education as a way to help students become more responsible world citizens. It asserts that a culture of problem-solving rooted purely in metrics is not sufficient to tackle the complex global challenges that we face moving forward. Instead, we need methods for collaboratively assigning value and making decisions that are not beholden to ones and zeros or the market logic of capitalism. Theater—the applied craft of making a world (big or small), an experience (long or short) that’s livable and sharable—offers one place where we can develop these aptitudes.