Unit rationale, description and aim

From geopolitics to natural resource development to climate change, Earth’s oceans play central roles in the twenty-first century’s defining concerns. To better engage those roles, scholars, policymakers, and publics have long turned to the marine sciences. But recent decades have seen growing recognition of the need for humanistic knowledge of ocean geographies, cultures, and lives. Genuine ‘ocean literacy’ requires that we comprehend not only ‘the ocean’s influence on us’ but ‘our influence on the ocean.’ The diverse and burgeoning field of the oceanic humanities brings qualitative, interdisciplinary tools to bear on this project.

Interweaving literary, historical, philosophical, and geographic methods, this third-year unit introduces students to essential topics in, and approaches to, oceanic humanities research. It engages students in a multidisciplinary examination of the construction of marine ‘regions’ before building toward a research plan designed to connect students’ disciplinary knowledge with a marine issue of urgent contemporary relevance. While the unit’s broad context is the ‘world ocean,’ it pays special attention to the so-called ‘Indo-Pacific’ region and to Australia’s place therein.

This unit aims to acquaint students with a subject, and an academic field, of rapidly growing significance, and equips them to engage its distinctive topics and methods.

2026 10

Campus offering

No unit offerings are currently available for this unit.

Prerequisites

UNCC100 Self and Community: Exploring the Anatomy of Modern Society OR PHCC102 Being Human OR PHCC104 Ethics and the Good Life

Learning outcomes

To successfully complete this unit you will be able to demonstrate you have achieved the learning outcomes (LO) detailed in the below table.

Each outcome is informed by a number of graduate capabilities (GC) to ensure your work in this, and every unit, is part of a larger goal of graduating from ACU with the attributes of insight, empathy, imagination and impact.

Explore the graduate capabilities.

Articulate the specific relevance of humanities kn...

Learning Outcome 01

Articulate the specific relevance of humanities knowledges for contextualizing and addressing the twenty-first century’s pressing marine concerns.
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC2, GC6, GC7

Describe the historical emergence, interdisciplina...

Learning Outcome 02

Describe the historical emergence, interdisciplinary composition, and primary methods of the oceanic humanities.
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC5, GC9

Employ the perspective of the oceanic humanities t...

Learning Outcome 03

Employ the perspective of the oceanic humanities to situate the student’s knowledge and experience in relation to marine place.
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC2, GC3, GC5, GC6, GC9, GC10, GC11

Employ oceanic humanities knowledge to comprehend ...

Learning Outcome 04

Employ oceanic humanities knowledge to comprehend relations between Australia, the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region, and the ‘world ocean'.
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC5, GC6, GC9

Design and Develop a research plan for an interdis...

Learning Outcome 05

Design and Develop a research plan for an interdisciplinary oceanic humanities project.
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC2, GC3, GC8, GC9, GC10, GC11

Content

Topics may include:

  • The role, and value, of humanities knowledges in marine studies
  • Oceanic literary studies
  • Oceanic history
  • Oceanic philosophy
  • Oceanic geography
  • Interdisciplinary oceanic humanities
  • Marine education and the concept of ‘ocean literacy’
  • Theories of oceanic place
  • Twenty-first century oceans: geopolitics, natural resource development, climate change
  • Oceanic regions: ‘Australian waters,’ the ‘Indo-Pacific,’ the ‘world ocean’
  • Interdisciplinary research design

Assessment strategy and rationale

The unit’s three assessments enable students to meet learning outcomes while developing key graduate attributes. The first assessment gauges students’ ability to locate the ocean’s role in urgent contemporary affairs, and to deploy their existing disciplinary knowledges to characterize that role. The second assessment places those knowledges in relation to a multidisciplinary array of marine methods, while also challenging students to comprehend and articulate connections between oceanic phenomena at multiple scales. Crucially, this assessment enables students to situate not only the course materials but themselves within an oceanic context - and to account for the historical, conceptual, ecological, and/or political emergence of that context. Ultimately, the third assessment will inspire students to imagine a truly interdisciplinary oceanic humanities research project without burdening them with the expectation of that project’s fulfillment within the time-scale of the unit. This exercise in research design will provide students the opportunity to not only draw together the unit’s various strands but experiment with the sort of higher-order planning that will serve them well in Honours and/or postgraduate work.

Overview of assessments

Assessment Task 1: Contemporary Oceans Assessment...

Assessment Task 1: Contemporary Oceans Assessment

For this assessment task, students will identify a marine issue of pressing contemporary concern within one of three general domains: geopolitics, natural resource development, and climate change. Working from the disciplinary training they have cultivated earlier in their undergraduate careers, students will explain how their chosen issue is fruitfully understood from a humanities perspective.

This task may be set as an oral presentation, short essay, in-class or online quizzes, as designated by the unit lead or lecturer.

Weighting

25%

Learning Outcomes LO1, LO3
Graduate Capabilities GC1, GC2, GC3, GC5, GC6, GC7, GC9, GC10, GC11

Assessment Task 2: Marine Regions Research Task ...

Assessment Task 2: Marine Regions Research Task

For this assessment task, students will use the tools of marine literary studies, history, philosophy, and/or geography to investigate one of three interrelated oceanic regions: Australian waters, the ‘Indo-Pacific,’ or the ‘world ocean.’ Deploying primary and secondary sources, students will explain how their chosen region has been constructed as a region, whether historically, conceptually, ecologically, and/or politically.

This task may be set as an essay, with some stages completed in class, as designated by the unit lead or lecturer.

Weighting

45%

Learning Outcomes LO1, LO3, LO4
Graduate Capabilities GC1, GC2, GC3, GC5, GC6, GC7, GC9, GC10, GC11

Assessment Task 3: Oceanic Humanities Research Pl...

Assessment Task 3: Oceanic Humanities Research Plan

For their final assessment, students will draw from their previous work, as well as from the methods discussed in the final weeks of the unit, to develop a research plan for an interdisciplinary oceanic humanities research project. The plan will clearly elucidate the project’s proposed research question, as well as its unique interdisciplinary approach to addressing that question.

This task may include a live Q&A session where the student answers questions about the proposal, if designated by the lecturer.

Weighting

30%

Learning Outcomes LO1, LO2, LO3, LO4, LO5
Graduate Capabilities GC1, GC2, GC3, GC5, GC6, GC7, GC8, GC9, GC10, GC11

Learning and teaching strategy and rationale

Through lectures, readings, and tutorial discussions, this unit establishes oceans’ central roles in pressing 21st-century concerns - and humanities knowledge’s value for addressing those concerns - while equipping students with the tools of the oceanic humanities. Its materials establish the sea’s contemporary relevance in relation to three key areas: geopolitics, natural resources, and climate change. With their first assessment, students mobilise their own disciplinary knowledge to articulate the sea’s role within one of these areas.

The unit continues with a multidisciplinary study of the concept of oceanic place. This unfurls through four disciplinary lenses - literary studies, history, philosophy, and geography - and in relation to three oceanic regions: Australian waters, the ‘Indo-Pacific,’ and the ‘world ocean.’ For their second assessment, students produce a substantial investigation, from the perspective of a humanities discipline, of the historical, cultural, ecological, and/or political construction of some oceanic region.

The unit culminates in a study of the most innovative methods of the oceanic humanities. These may encompass subfields like 'critical ocean studies,' 'critical seabed studies,’ and ‘blue media studies.’ Students will be challenged, finally, to produce a detailed research plan for an interdisciplinary oceanic humanities project, which may prove useful for their Honours and/or postgraduate careers.

Representative texts and references

Representative texts and references

Anderson, Jon and Kimberley Peters, eds. Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014.

Armitage, David, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds. Oceanic Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Doyle, Timothy and Dennis Rumley. The Rise and Return of the Indo-Pacific. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.

Mentz, Steve. An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2024.

Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Newlands, Maxine and Claire Hansen, eds. Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities. London and New York: Routledge, 2024.

Peters, Kimberley, Jon Anderson, Andrew Davies, and Philip Steinberg, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Ocean Space. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2023.

Saltwater: Yirrkala Bark Paintings of Sea Country: Recognising Indigenous Sea Rights. Neutral Bay: Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre and Jennifer Isaacs Publishing, 2019.

Steinberg, Philip E. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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