Blue Lab - Blue Lab

Image courtesy of USGS

Overview

Founded in 2021 and led by Allison Carruth and Barron Bixler, Blue Lab is an environmental storytelling and media production studio housed at Princeton University. The lab provides a training ground for established, emerging and aspiring environmental storytellers.

Our flagship projects to date include three podcast series (Archival Ecologies, Carried by Water and Mining for the Climate) along with a documentary film project titled California on the Edge, currently in production, that is helmed by Bixler and Carruth. In these and other projects, the lab produces hyperlocal, research-driven and aesthetically captivating stories that explore how climate change and other environmental challenges are upending lifeways, transforming relationships to place and, for many, making the future feel increasingly contingent.

In our work, we bridge the tools of art and science, research and creative practice, historical knowledge and speculative imagination. The lab's animating question is how different communities make sense of real-time environmental change (and in some cases catastrophic loss) in relationship to the places they love, value and call home.

The lab's core members have expertise in a wide range of fields, including American studies, anthropology, environmental arts, environmental humanities, geoscience, hydrology, Latin American history, multispecies justice, poetry and poetics, photography and theater. We partner with artists, editors, producers, journalists and filmmakers as well as community groups, media outlets and environmental organizations.

Funders

The lab currently receives support from the Princeton University programs and centers listed below and from the American Council of Learned Societies. To learn more about how to support our work, please contact the lab director and principal investigator, Allison Carruth.

What We Do

Climate stories incubator

Blue Lab's central activity is the Climate Stories Incubator (CSI). A key premise for the CSI is that predominant ways of communicating climate change tend to foreground either computational modeling or apocalyptic storytelling. These approaches move some groups, but fall flat with others, partly by excluding diverse experiences, knowledge and ideas. In response, the CSI develops research-driven stories about lived experiences of climate change for people as well as for other species. CSI projects also provide insights into how different communities make sense of and respond to not only observable climate change but also competing visions and forms of climate action.

Research + publication

Alongside our multimedia storytelling projects, the lab investigates how and when dominant forms of science communication and environmental narrative have broad impact, and who they fail to represent or engage and why. We conduct this research with particular attention to the histories, epistemologies and values that shape contemporary conflicts around science, nature and climate change. To provide a forum for this type of environmental research and for allied creative projects, the lab plans to publish a digital journal beginning in 2024.

Programming

Working with co-sponsors, the lab supports and convenes screenings, exhibits, workshops and symposia. The lab also hosts environmental researchers, journalists, writers and artists. In 2022-2023, the lab is hosting artist/educators Sarah Rothberg and Marina Zurkow (co-creators of "Investing in Futures") and co-sponsoring the Ecotheories Colloquium. We also support and collaborate with the Media + Environment journal, published by University of California Press and co-edited by Alenda Chang, Adrian Ivakhiv and Janet Walker.