PGR Research Culture & Community Seminar Programme: Water Culture Seminar Series

Michael Lomotey FRSA, Black Futures Doctoral Researcher, University of Southampton

 

"Living the Afterlife of Slavery: using the frame of antiblackness to assess flood-risk preparedness, response and post-disaster reconstruction in Hull"

 

Hybrid and in person - Larkin LT-A

 

The legacy of the violent enslavement of Africans created the indelible image of Black people as nonhuman (Mushonga et al., 2022). Where the continuing colonial endeavour brings varied oppressions (Sultana, 2022), little ingress is made in linking chattel slavery with the twin environmental crisis of a changing climate and damaged ecosystems, not fully unpacking the encounter, or the lack of emancipatory practice. Environmentalism it appears, mirrors other socio/economic/cultural institutions where Black lives are definitely not mattering. Antiblackness, the delegitimising and de-humanisation of Black people in modernity, has a pernicious selective targeting (Gordon, 2018; Grimes, 2020), which arguably deserves a requisite focus within environmentalism. This talk will describe how I am using antiblackness provocatively as an ontological framework through which to interrogate climate hazards and disaster risk response in Hull. To conclude it will direct thoughts to climate secure Black futures citing fugitivity as an epistemology, a move to freedom from the violent domination of the anachronistic slave plantation.

 

If you are not able to join us in Larkin LT-A please join online here.

Allison Newsome, artist and advocate for sustainable water management

'RainKeep / public rain harvest utility sculpture'

Hybrid and in-person - Kingsley Suite, Canham Turner

Biography

Allison Newsome, with an MFA degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, is a distinguished artist and advocate for sustainable water management. In 2023, she achieved a significant milestone as a keynote speaker at the United Nations water summit during NY Water Week. Allison's remarkable public sculptures grace various prominent locations, including SoHo NYC, the Florida Botanical Gardens, and the United Nations Water Summit at the Dutch Consulate, among others. Her art transcends aesthetics and serves a practical purpose in promoting sustainable water practices. One of her notable creations, 'RainKeep,' utilizes sculpture as a means to revolutionize rain harvesting. With a visionary approach, she recognizes rainwater as a valuable resource, not to be discarded but harnessed for a greener future. These RainKeeps stand as both unique works of art and essential components of a broader infrastructural ecosystem. Allison's dedication to combining smart water management with public art comes at a critical time when climate and water preservation are paramount.

Public art has the power to change people's minds and hearts, and, consequently, their behavior. As a pioneer in sculptures that feature rain harvesting and water storage, my art serves not only as bright, sculptural beacons but as green-led, functional components of a broader, infrastructural ecosystem with LEED credits. While most roofs and infrastructures are designed to dispose of water as quickly as possible, I see rainwater as a resource to be harnessed, not a problem to be disposed of. My RainKeeps are created to marry smart water management with public art. Each one is unique, some very ornate, others more simple. All create focal points for viewers and are used to harvest, store and provide water for an inspired landscape in the artworks vicinity. My work is ‘timely’ in a time when Climate and water is of utmost importance.

My hope is that my RainKeep installations will be catalysts for visitors to mingle and will act as a core public engagement. With inclusivity and the transformative power of creative education, I envision my work to encourage visitors to question, learn and explore in an immersive environment conducive to enjoyment and relaxation and open up a door to a conversation about

sustainable practices w/ storm water runoff using sculpture as a vehicle and solution. The British Institute of Ankara have invited me as a guest speaker to develop a comprehensive training program tailored to municipalities, focusing on executed case studies of urban rainwater harvesting within public open spaces. The project is run by the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA) (https://biaa.ac.uk/research/climate-change-adaptation-kadikoy/) and funded by the British Embassy in Türkiye.   

If you are not able to join us in the Kingsley Suite please join online here.

Professor Veronica Strang FAcSS, Oxford University

"Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis"

 

Hybrid and in person - Larkin LT-A

 

Biography

Professor Veronica Strang is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research in Australia, the UK and New Zealand. Her work is concerned with human-environmental relations, materiality, cultural landscapes, and societies’ engagements with water. She has worked with UNESCO and the UN on water and sustainability issues and conducts research assisting indigenous communities’ land and water claims. Her work has contributed to debates on non-human rights, and she recently completed a major comparative study examining historical and contemporary beliefs about water deities and their capacities to illuminate different trajectories of development in human-environmental relationships.

 

Since completing a DPhil at the University of Oxford in 1995, Veronica has held teaching and research positions at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the University’s Environmental Change Unit; the University of Wales; Goldsmiths University; and the University of Auckland. In 2012 she took up a role as the Executive Director of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study. From 2013-2017 she served as the Chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth, and from 2017-2022 assisted Research England’s national advisory panel on interdisciplinarity.

 

In 2000 Veronica received a Royal Anthropological Institute Urgent Anthropology Fellowship, and in 2007 she was awarded an international water prize by UNESCO. In 2019 she was elected as Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

 

Her publications include Uncommon Ground: cultural landscapes and environmental values (Berg 1997); The Meaning of Water (Berg 2004); Gardening the World: agency, identity and the ownership of water (Berghahn 2009); Ownership and Appropriation (Berg 2010); Water: nature and culture (Reaktion 2015) and Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis (Reaktion 2023). Further details are available on her website: https://www.veronicastrang.com/

 

Abstract

This paper describes the findings emerging from anthropologist Veronica Strang’s recently completed major comparative study of water deities, described in her book, Water Beings: from nature worship to the environmental crisis (Reaktion Books 2023). Veronica’s research draws on her own and others’ ethnographic studies, as well as on museum collections, archaeology, history, the classics, psychology, theology and the cognitive sciences.

 

Multiple serpentine deities have appeared ubiquitously throughout human history and across cultural boundaries, expressing the generative and sometimes destructive powers of water, its material properties, and its central role in human lives. Venerated in prehistoric cave paintings and petroglyphs, and in ancient carvings and images, ophidian water beings remind us that all early human societies worshipped ‘nature’. While some societies continued to venerate non-human deities for millennia, others shifted their religious beliefs towards humanised and (with the emergence of monotheisms) exclusively male gods. Water beings nevertheless continued to flow through many cultural contexts.

 

Following their fortunes through different societal trajectories is revealing. With direct relevance to contemporary environmental concerns, what happens to water beings over time illuminates key changes in human relationships with water and the non-human domain, showing how and why many societies shifted from respectful nature worship to the exploitative practices that have led to the current environmental crisis. Today, in the contemporary political arena, water deities are resurfacing, enabling indigenous people and environmental and social activists to articulate a critique of unsustainable neo-liberal practices and promote social and ecological justice. In providing ways to imagine more equitable human-non-human relations, water beings can help societies to turn away from climate crisis towards lifeways that enable the flourishing of all living kinds.

 

CONTACT DETAILS

Professor Veronica Strang FAcSS, 11 East Street, Osney Island, Oxford OX2 0AU, UK

Tel:  +44 07751 756261 / (0)1865 436380 

Websites:  https://www.veronicastrang.com/

University of Oxford, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography

https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-veronica-strang 

Academy of Social Sciences

https://www.acss.org.uk/fellow/professor-veronica-strang/

 

If you are not able to join us in Larkin LT-A please join online here.

Professor Faye Hammill, Professor of English Literature and Canadian Studies at the University of Glasgow

'Liner passengering and oceanic environments'

Hybrid and in-person -Larkin LT-A

Biography

Prof. Faye Hammill is author or coauthor of six books, including Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (2010) which won the European Society for the Study of English book prize. Her project Ocean Modern (https://oceanmodern.gla.ac.uk) is funded by an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship. She is involved in several maritime heritage projects: as a trustee of the Unicorn Preservation Society, a board member of the Shipyard Trust and a Charity Associate at Friends of the TS Queen Mary.

This talk presents findings from the AHRC-funded "Ocean Modern" project, which is about literary and cultural representations of the ocean liner. In a surprising number of the available texts, writers turn their gaze inwards, focusing entirely on the material and social affordances of the ship and leaving the sea itself out of account. Narratives in which the experience of liner passengering is intimately bound up with the marine environment are much rarer, yet there are some compelling examples. The paper focuses on a selection of texts (published between the 1930s and 1950s) which explore “sea-change” and oceanic space in relation to the modern self. Among them are works by the American food writer MFK Fisher, the Jamaican-born Creole novelist Eliot Bliss, the Canadian poet Louis Dudek, and the British diplomat and diarist Harold Nicolson.

If you are not able to join us in Larkin LT-A please join online here.

Dr Elsa Devienne, Assistant Professor in US History, Programme Leader for the American Studies, History & American Studies and English & American Studies BAs, Research lead for the American Studies research group, Northumbria University

“A simple thing to save the earth: Historicizing the beach cleanup in the neoliberal era”

Hybrid and in-person - Larkin LT-A

Participating in a beach cleanup is an incredibly popular form of environmental action. Ever since the first “citizen cleanups” were organized in the mid-1980s in Texas and Oregon, the phenomenon has grown rapidly, with Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup Day mobilizing over one million volunteers in 150 countries each year. But, for what and for whom are beach cleanups? Inspired by the insights of discard studies, this paper argues that while the beginnings of cleanups held radical promises, ensuing developments were fraught with compromises. Beach cleanups have been extremely successful at raising awareness of a key issue among the general public—the plastic crisis. Yet cleanup organizers’ ultimate goal—the end of plastic pollution—has become more elusive as our plastic addiction has continued unabated. What does this paradox say about postwar environmentalism and our perceptions of nature, cleanliness, and the future? Ultimately, historicizing the beach cleanup complicates our understanding of the plastic crisis, modern environmentalist tactics, and nature consciousness in the neoliberal era.

If you are not able to join us in Larkin LT-A please join online here.

Dr Daniel Finch- Race, Assistant Professor in Geography, University of Bologna 

‘Lagoonal Thinking via Ciardi, Cottet and Fragiacomo’

Hybrid and in-person, Larkin LT-A

What is gained from foregrounding more-than-human geographies when it comes to risk management? This paper takes inspiration from the blue humanities as theorized by the likes of Cecilia Chen and Steve Mentz to consider the environmental conditions surrounding the MoSE floodgates that came into force in Venice in 2020 as an attempt to counter major high-water events in central areas around St Mark’s Basilica. Against the backdrop of multifaceted ecological challenges facing modern Italy, the conundrum of sustainability in the hydropolis has been extensively debated not only in coverage of the engineering megaproject but also in works as varied as Piero Bevilacqua’s Venice and the Water, Margaret Plant’s Venice, Serenella Iovino’s Ecocriticism and Italy and Sophia Psarra’s The Venice Variations. By way of a mode of ‘lagoonal thinking’ rooted in Pietro Fragiacomo’s Santa Maria della Salute (1884), Guglielmo Ciardi’s Lagoon (1891) and Charles Cottet’s Venice (1896), the argument here has to do with valuing different kinds of complexity in the context of major infrastructural interventions.

Biography

Daniel Finch-Race FHEA FRGS is Assistant Professor in Geography at the University of Bologna, Communications Consultant for Economia&Ecologia, and Deputy Treasurer for the European Society of Comparative Literature. He sits on the editorial boards of Modern & Contemporary France and Storicamente. His solo articles and themed issues encompass journals such as European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes, Lagoonscapes and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. He co-edited French Ecocriticism (Peter Lang) and Textures (Peter Lang), plus three ecocritical issues of Dix-neuf and L’esprit créateur. He is contracted to co-author The Cambridge Introduction to Women’s Poetry in French (Cambridge University Press) and co-edit Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities (Liverpool University Press).

If you are not able to join us in Larkin LT-A please join online here.

Stephen Scott-Bottoms is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester

"Starting with the Story: connecting people, place, water and climate through relational performance in West Yorkshire."

Hybrid and in person - Larkin LT-A

In this illustrated talk, Stephen Scott-Bottoms reflects on a decade of practical research exploring the relationships of communities and responsible organisations in Leeds and Bradford with their water environments and with each other. From the Boxing Day floods of 2015 to the summer drought of 2022, Steve has used theatre and storytelling to dramatise some of the local challenges presented by a changing climate. In the process, he has worked with partners as diverse as the Aire Rivers Trust, Leeds City Council, the Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission, and most recently JBA Consulting. He will use examples from this work to explore some broader questions around the uses and benefits of storytelling in building collective resilience.

If you are not able to join us in Larkin LT-A please join online here.