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Public Events

Monday, 21 June 2010 - “Thinking with Water: Beyond Text” Artists’ Panel - 16:45-18:30, Hall Building, H-767

Moving beyond text and materializing alternate approaches to thinking with water, artists and researchers Sarah Renshaw, Rae Staseson and Gisèle Trudel (Ælab) will present and discuss their work with water. Thoughtful, thought-provoking and materially rich, their artworks, Stream of Consciousness (2010), Water Drawing (version 1) and the “conference performance” of light, sweet, cold, dark, crude (LSCDC) (2006-), offer a generative counterpoint to the written components of the Thinking With Water collection. During the opening reception, Emily Rose Michaud will offer a rare tasting of nearby waters, and there will be music courtesy DJ Claire.

Tuesday, 22 June 2010 - Water Drawing vernissage - 17:00-19:00, Concordia, Loyola Campus, CJ Building

Wednesday, 23 June 2010 - Stream of Consciousness event - about 19:30, Lachine Canal, on the Atwater footbridge

Stream of Consciousness is an outdoor installation by Sarah Renshaw.

Workshop

Thinking With Water: A Workshop on Water and Cultural Theory will take place from June 21st to June 23rd, 2010. Hosted by Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, the workshop will bring together academics, artists, activists, students and other members of the public to collectively engage with water’s diverse meanings and materialities. See also abstracts.

Sessions during the day will allow contributors to the Thinking With Water edited collection to share and discuss their draft chapters in a small group setting. As such, these sessions will be closed and invitational. However, evening and afternoon events such as an artist’s panel and openings for art installations will be open to the general public. Please see the detailed schedule, maps, and the list of workshop drafts here.

Thinking With Water floats, rather than sinks, thanks to the generous support of many partners. We would like to warmly acknowledge the financial contributions of the following institutions and individuals:

• The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s “Aid to Research Workshops and Conferences in Canada”
• The Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University
• Hexagram-Concordia: Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technologies
• The Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture (York University)
• The Canada Research Chair in Political Ecology and Environmental Political Theory (Acadia University)

Additionally, we would like to thank the following individuals for their invaluable support, energies, advice and ideas:

• All the excellent participants of the Thinking With Water project
• Dr. Peter van Wyck (Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University)
• Dr. Catriona Sandilands (Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture, York University)
• Rae Stasesson (Chair, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University)
• Jonathan Crago, McGill-Queen’s University Press
• Michele Kaplan, Office of the Vice-President of Research and Graduate Studies, Concordia University

Currently, many debates circulate around whether water should be understood as a common public good or a commodified private resource. Much valuable thinking addresses the urgent need to manage water scarcities, to negotiate political and military conflicts over water, to mitigate the impacts of climate change on watersheds, and to contest water’s appropriation, diversion, and contamination. In a largely separate stream of thought, the role that water plays in our mythical and symbolic imaginaries has been richly explored.

The Thinking With Water project

both challenges and complements such studies by looking to the flows between and among water, materiality, meaning, and theory. In this project, water is engaged as a distinctly ecocultural phenomenon that is both material and semiotic. How might we significantly deepen our understandings of not only current environmental challenges, but also the political, economic, and cultural relations that are inextricably tangled therein? How, in turn, can aqueous perspectives on ethics, ontology, sociality, citizenship, representation, difference, and politics transform these fundamental categories of critical thought? Finally, what can a critical engagement with water, as both metaphor and materiality, contribute to the emerging field of environmental cultural theory? Through a deep irrigation of our dominant modes and paradigms of thinking, this project seeks to liberate blocked flows within critical and cultural theory, and to open towards more ethical, respectful and just articulations with water, our planetary lifeblood.

The co-organizers of this project are Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Chen, and Janine MacLeod. Please also see the support and funding page.

From June 21st to 23rd 2010, we will host an international and interdisciplinary workshop at Concordia University in Montreal. While the workshop will be closed and invitational, events planned in conjunction with the workshop, including an artist's panel and openings for two art installations, will invite artists, activists, students and other members of the public into our conversation on water and culture.

• Public events
• Preliminary program
  [for participants only – see program pdf]

We've got water on the brain

-- but this is not necessarily a condition of hydrocephalus. We've been thinking about rivers and glaciers and oceans, upstream and downstream, water wars and water pacts, hydrological cycles and city infrastructures, water politics, communications and philosophy. Water is the matrix of life and thought, the ultimate solvent, seeping into and across conventional classifications of knowing. It is at once rarefied and everyday, sanctified and instrumentalized. A pervasive relational medium, water communicates across temporal, spatial and disciplinary divides, and plays a central role in corporeal, ecological and imaginative domains... more about this project.