Approaching a Waterway

Food systems and waterways are essential for sustaining life in every ecosystem. Yet despite this critical importance, they are often under threat due to industrial pollutants and misguided water management systems. Through three case studies, the presenters approach the problems of the changing relationships and knowledge practices that riddle these systems, giving rise to many of the problems we see today.

5 pm
Reflections of the Past: Re-establishing a Sturgeon Population in the Danube by Finding a Common Baseline
Christina Gruber

Reflecting on the relationships between rivers and people on the Danube and Mississippi rivers, artist Christina Gruber investigates the lives of sturgeons who have been pushed to the edge of extinction.

5.40 pm
Seeds of Knowledge
Lynn Peemoeller

Food system planner Lynn Peemoeller continues a discussion about reclaiming intertribal knowledge exchange in the Midwestern US to reorient notions of belonging within foodways, ecosystems and knowledge traditions.

6.20 pm
(Re)Storying the Kuils River
Nikiwe Solomon & Adrian Van Wyk

Anthropologist Nikiwe Solomon and Adrian Van Wyk depict a deep history and a possible future of the Kuils River near Cape Town, as increasingly higher loads of chemical pollutants make it a site for investigating how siloed disciplinary thinking and modernist predispositions have prevented a big-picture consideration of the waterway.