Participants

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 community require a dialectical account of human nature rather than a simple...

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 this current by asking: what flows beneath (human) ethics that is itself...

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 is rich with metaphoric and material significance. On the one hand,...

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 bodies of water, tracing the ways in which water’s symbolic potency can...

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 increasing human incursions into arctic waters--be they for oil and...

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 of extreme close-ups. Through intense, long, and seamlessly looped...

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 informed by the transformations of waste water in various states of...

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 spatially and temporally downstream in a time of global warming, they...