Image courtesy of Barron Bixler
Overview
Launched in 2021, Blue Lab is an environmental research, storytelling and art group led by Allison Carruth. Our multidisciplinary team explores and helps to make visible lived experiences of large-scale environmental issues, from climate change and biodiversity loss to food and water justice.
In this work, we bridge the tools of art and science, research and creative practice, historical knowledge and speculative imagination. Our animating question is how different people make sense of real-time environmental change (and in some cases catastrophic loss) in relationship to intergenerational memory and future anticipation about places they love, value and call home. As part of the lab's ongoing Climate Stories Incubator we are currently working on projects centered in California, New Jersey, coastal Virginia, British Columbia, the Puna region of Latin America and Paiute and Shoshone lands in northern Nevada. Each project involves the development of a public story series and/or body of creative work along with research about the methods, challenges and impacts of the projects themselves.
Our core members have expertise in fields that include 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.
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.