In her paper, Roburn trains her ear on the acoustic ecology of the arctic's rapidly warming oceans. As multiyear ice increasingly gives way to seasonal ice, or to no ice at all, the physical and geopolitical resonances of arctic ocean spaces are changing. Climate change is...
A qualitative mapping of place, region, landscape, or waterway may be called a chorography. This text engages us in a poetic and creative recounting of the Lachine Canal, a vestigial corridor that draws a shallow line through the southwestern portion of the island of Montreal...
In this dialogic paper, Wong and Christian ask how cultural perspectives shape our views of and interactions with water—be it as a commodity, a resource, the embodiment of spirit, a reminder of how all life on the planet is interrelated, and more. Considering what is both...
As an important component of what Gaston Bachelard calls “the material imagination,” water brings a powerful and varied repertoire of emotional, cultural and sensual associations to its role as metaphor. This paper explores the tension between two very different metaphoric...
As words coalesce in a flow of consciousness they provide form for otherwise formless and transient thoughts. Renshaw will sew and tie together words using organic material that will then be set loose to drift down a stream. This material intervention will float in water as a...
This paper takes a critical view of dualistic visions of Culture and Nature, proposing a more holistic, processual model. Employing water ‘to think with’, it considers the multiple flows between social, cultural and ecological processes. It suggests that, by enabling an...
In ths work, Rae Staseson denatures and makes strange water’s un-still surface. Water Drawing is a work in progress, a video and sound installation that is a conceptual, temporal and formal investigation. The materiality of water’s surface is explored using a series...
Thinking with water has traditionally been the domain of hydro-engineering, which has effectively engineered water into a self-evident background so that it is easily available for everyday consumption. Without this accomplishment modern civilization could not exist. Safe...
Mielle Chandler and Astrida Neimanis question the very ground of ethics and explore its aqueous condition of possibility in a more-than-human world. While some theorists have attempted to broaden humanist ethics to include non-human entities, Chandler and Neimanis disturb...
In this paper, Cecilia Chen proposes that thinking with water may radically reshape mapping practices. Water puts life in relation to other lives. It communicates between bodies of different kinds and at multiple scales. In its most lively and potentially deadly movements,...
In an age of global “flows” and historical blockages, amidst a crisis of financial “liquidity” and a general rhetoric of “fluid” identities, political communities and ideologies, the hydro-electric mega-dam looms as both an icon and a technology of global power relations that...
Process-oriented and informal in nature, the research and production of light, sweet, cold, dark, crude (LSCDC) takes form as a cycle of audiovisual microevents (2006-09) that includes immersive sound, moving image, drawing and light and that is...
This paper uses the case of Canadian nationalism’s intertwinement with water to discuss the politics of sustainability, scale, and identity. The paper uses a (highly tentative) defense of Canadian nationalism to argue a broader point: that the prospects for sustainable...
Jellyfish and other gelatinous creatures float beyond human comprehension in a zone where science and aesthetics flow together in puzzling ways. As scientists have struggled to capture, distinguish and categorize these fragile and fluid forms of life, which become “shapeless...
Placing water at the core of a materialist theory of citizenship, Gwendolyn Blue aims to produce a “dislocation” in capitalist-driven and anthropocentric imaginaries, enabling recognition that non-market and more-than-human oriented visions of citizenship and...
In this paper, Spiegel explores the powerful campaign for justice led by women in Bhopal, India. When a valve broke in the American-owned Union Carbide factory in 1984, forty tons of methyl isocyanate were released, killing thousands on the spot. Meanwhile, as early as 1976,...
