Image courtesy of USGS

Blue Lab participates in and helps to convene screenings, exhibits, workshops, public talks and other events. The lab periodically hosts environmental researchers, journalists, writers and artists. Since 2022, the lab has supported a residency for environmental artist and educators Sarah Rothberg and Marina Zurkow and has co-sponsored the Princeton Ecotheories Colloquium and Marine City Art Show. The lab currently co-sponsors the Media + Environment journal, published by University of California Press.

“What We Can’t Burn”: A conversation with author Eve Driver

October 22, 2024•4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Princeton University, Robertson Hall, Room 001

Join Princeton’s environmental research and storytelling group Blue Lab for a conversation with author Eve Driver about her captivating debut book, co-authored with Tom Osborn, What We Can’t Burn: Friendship and Friction in the Fight for Our Energy Future.  The conversation will be moderated by Gemma Sahwell, a PhD candidate in geoscience at Princeton and core member of Blue Lab.

Community Events

Blue Lab Popup Story Patch at Morris Arboretum: Ecotopian Tools for Multispecies Flourishing

Animals, Art & Media, Public Humanities, Urban Ecologies
June 15, 2024•10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Morris Arboretum & Gardens

Supported by an award from the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities and set within the curated landscape of the arboretum, the Blue Lab Popup Story Patch: Ecotopian Tools for Multispecies Flourishing will create for visitors a space that is both part of and apart from their experience of nature–a space of generative self-reflection and freeplay that reframes their relationships to the multispecies worlds around them.
Conferences & Symposia•Roundtables

“Stories of resilience” forum (Sundance | RNPN)

March 27, 2024•1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Virtual
Conversation about The Hottest August This online forum is convened by the Artist Accelerator Program at Sundance Institute in partnership with  Resilient Nation Partnership Network (RNPN). The discussion is part of RNPN’s Eighth Annual Forum, organized around the theme of “Stories of Resilience: Voices that Inspire.” The Forum highlights how storytelling can build community resilience, bringing filmmakers, artists and community leaders together to show [...]
Conferences & Symposia•Talks

Micropolitics of environmental media (MLA)

January 4, 2024•3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
MLA 2024 in Philadelphia
The Climate Stories Incubator This talk by Allison Carruth is part of the Screen Arts and Culture Forum-sponsored panel session at the 2024 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Philadelphia. The session explores how media studies and environmental studies interface in the field of ecomedia. The speakers will address case studies in ecomedia research, teaching, public engagement and creative practice. The panel is convened [...]
Invitational Events•Roundtables•Workshops

Environmental humanities institution building (Northwestern)

December 6, 2023•3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Northwestern University (Zoom)
Environmental Humanities Institution Building Symposium This invitational virtual event will feature Blue Lab director Allison Carruth in conversation with Elizabeth Hennessy, (professor of history and environmental studies at Wisconsin), Weishun Lu (Edge Effects managing editor and PhD student in English at Wisconsin), and Paul Sabin (professor of history and American studies at Yale). The group will be in conversation about the evolution and horizons [...]
Conferences & Symposia•Exhibits & Screenings•Invitational Events

Building life symposium (MoMA | Princeton)

November 10, 2023
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) | Princeton Architecture School
Building Life: Spatial Politics, Science and Environmental Epistemes This two-day public symposium examines how entanglements between the interdisciplinary fields of the built environment and the sciences have transformed concepts of nature, territory, and the environment over time, reproducing global inequities that continue to (un)build life. The symposium will feature an array of scholars and practitioners whose work is reshaping our understanding of what it [...]
Conferences & Symposia

Experiments in place-based research and creative practice (ASLE-AESS)

July 11, 2023•1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Oregon Convention Center, Meeting Room G132
Experiments in Place-based Environmental Research and Creative Practice This roundtable will introduce works-in-progress from Blue Lab core team members. Introducing several current projects, the roundtable will discuss our approaches to place-based environmental research and creative practice. The guiding question for our shared work, which will structure the discussion, is how climate change and other planetary crises are being lived in real-time and how different [...]
Lectures & Keynotes

Oceanography otherwise: Marine methods in the environmental humanities

March 30, 2023•12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Robertson Hall, Bowl 002

In this lecture and event series hosted by Blue Lab, Ali Glassie, a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, presented her work at the intersection of comparative literature, environmental humanities, and ocean history. Her current book project, Atlantic Shapeshifters: Sea Literature’s Fluid Forms, uses 20th century and contemporary literature in English, Spanish, and Portuguese to recover and center gendered and racialized experiences with the ocean. In doing so, the book draws on her training in marine affairs and her professional experience at sea.
Invitational Events•Workshops

Creative practice for social impact workshop

March 2, 2023•6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
University of Texas, Arlington

Co-led by Allison Carruth and Barron Bixler of Princeton University's Blue Lab, this workshop is designed for scholars and students from across disciplines who have a creative practice or creative project idea and would benefit from insights on how to develop such work into a public-facing project with social impact. The workshop addresses a combination of conceptual principles and practical approaches to making collaborative, creative, multimedia work and finding audiences for it. For this invitational workshop at the University of Texas, Arlington, we will take as food and environmental justice storytelling as a case study.
Lectures & Keynotes

Ecotheories colloquium sponsor

November 3, 2022
Princeton University (various)

In this lecture and event series hosted by Blue Lab, Ali Glassie, a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University, presented her work at the intersection of comparative literature, environmental humanities, and ocean history. Her current book project, Atlantic Shapeshifters: Sea Literature’s Fluid Forms, uses 20th century and contemporary literature in English, Spanish, and Portuguese to recover and center gendered and racialized experiences with the ocean. In doing so, the book draws on her training in marine affairs and her professional experience at sea.
Lectures & Keynotes

‘The science is clear’: Why the climate crisis needs new narratives”

Climate, Narrative, Science & Culture
April 5, 2022•12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Princeton University

"'The Science is Clear" make a case for narratives that develop localized, lived accounts of climate change by drawing from examples that at once contribute on-the-ground knowledge and envision possible futures beyond catastrophe.
Community Events•Exhibits & Screenings

Marine city art show sponsor

Climate, Narrative, Science & Culture
March 12, 2022
Greenpoint Art Circle

"'The Science is Clear" make a case for narratives that develop localized, lived accounts of climate change by drawing from examples that at once contribute on-the-ground knowledge and envision possible futures beyond catastrophe.
Lectures & Keynotes

Nature remade

Climate, Environmental Humanities, Technology & Culture
October 25, 2021•3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
University of Tennessee (Virtual)

"Nature remade" addresses a strain of environmental thought centered on the West Coast that advances a simultaneously neocolonial and futuristic orientation to the climate crisis. Through this lens of nature remade,ecosystems must be technologically retrofitted to sustain privileged modes of human life—rather than remediated through structural transformations that arc toward environmental justice.