Practicing (?) Environmental Justice
What is environmental justice? Is it a movement? Is it an outcome? What follows is my thought process on how environmental justice fits (or doesn’t) into bottom-up and top-down spaces; and how young people should seek to understand it. (...)
River Semester Map and Daily Blog
From August 28 - December 9, 2023, the River Semester travelled downstream with stops at river hubs along the way. Follow their progress as they travel downstream. (...)
Reflections on Confluence 2
From May 25th to May 28th, 2023, the Mississippi River Open School gathered in the Twin Cities for Confluence 2. These four reflections are a multi-faceted portrait of the Confluence. (...)
Mutual Earthly Delights
At the core of a just transition must be a cultural shift to respect water, earth, and all non-human beings. To recognize our delicate position within creation and honor and respect its limits. (...)
Infrastructuring Inequality: Investigations of a Proposed Nickel Mine in Northern Minnesota
Educating the public and students about a controversial underground nickel mine in Tamarack, Minnesota to fuel the transition to electric vehicle (EV) drivership. (...)
Spirituality and Ecology: (Re)Membering Black Women’s Legacies
I no longer have to be cut off from my being. I no longer have to be cut off from the earth. (...)
A River, Both Warm and Cool
This conflict of observational processes and ways of thinking have led to centuries of invalidation of Indigenous science, which, as mentioned many times by Ethan, has proved again and again to offer observations that put one in harmony and understanding of our world, as well as in our cosmology. (...)
Shifting Landscapes: Urban Enslavement in Antebellum New Orleans
Students and faculty around the world began to create new virtual and augmented reality projects like Sojourners' Trail - the first interactive, Afrofuturist classroom game. Sojourners' Trail featured a time-traveling framework to explore Black communities at their peak of social and economic vitality, shattering mythologies of intergenerational poverty and dysfunction among African American families. (...)
The Remote Sensation of Disintegration
Experimental film exploring Louisiana’s ecological bodies and their segregation by extractivism—the process of extracting natural resources from the Earth to sell on the world market—witnessed from the water of the Mississippi River, the sky over Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, and satellites accessed from a computer in London.
An ongoing work, the film is formed from a variety of materials including images from research trips, oil industry datasets, and audio recording reflecting on the knowledg (...)
A Big River Continuum
From the Iron Range in Minnesota’s Northern reaches to industrial farming in the South, to the strength and vibrancy of its Native reservations, it’s impossible to write about rural Minnesota as a singular place. While urban areas concentrate complexity, rural Minnesota exhibits it over expansive distances. Many of the issues that have made the Twin Cities the recent focus of national attention are echoed in the state's rural struggles. These include explosive fights over social and racial justi (...)
On the Recuperative Mismanagement of a Cosmopolitan Fish
To close the opening week of The Shape of a Practice, artists created a convivial meal-at-a-distance with so-called invasive species. From a kitchen in Carbondale, Illinois, artist Sarah Lewison, alongside storyteller and soul food authority Swan Parsons, prepare a meal of Asian carp, opening up questions related to an eco-logic of planetary care and our relationships to habitat. From Berlin and Chicago, artist and biologist Andrew Yang, biologist Florian Rutland and artist Alexandra Toland prep (...)
Water Language: A Conversation with Shanai Matteson and Oscar Tuazon
From the Iron Range in Minnesota’s Northern reaches to industrial farming in the South, to the strength and vibrancy of its Native reservations, it’s impossible to write about rural Minnesota as a singular place. While urban areas concentrate complexity, rural Minnesota exhibits it over expansive distances. Many of the issues that have made the Twin Cities the recent focus of national attention are echoed in the state's rural struggles. These include explosive fights over social and racial justi (...)
Drawn Together
In designing and operating large-scale infrastructures, humans tend toward fixity—despite increasingly dynamic conditions, such as those at play in the Mississippi River Delta context. The Anthropocene River Campus seminar “Un/bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability” sought to explore the multi-scalar effects of such human interventions, and how new futures might be imagined that engage and work with these dynamics. To do so, the seminar employed the practice of drawing as its core method (...)
Born Secret
The video follows this “Anthropocene mode of production” to its top-secret origin at Oak Ridge Laboratory, where the Manhattan Project drew on hydroelectric power furnished by the river-basin development program of the Tennessee Valley Authority. (...)
After Extraction
This field guide combines creative non-fiction and images to depict a partial history of extractive land use in Central Illinois, and is accompanied by a set of exercises, questions, and prompts that act as a tool for learning about the lands where you are. Both texts are complemented by artist Ryan Griffis’ video work on the destruction of wetlands during colonial expansion. (...)
Edible Encounters
Edible Encounters gave us an opportunity to observe the contrast between the wild bursts of biodiversity in the marginal areas along the river and the widespread control of nature exemplified by the endless cornfields in this region. These series of edible encounters and territorial mash-ups offered interpretations of foods that have bioregional origins or are part of long-standing Indigenous traditions or both. It was an opportunity to look to Indigenous knowledge, tradition, and creativity to (...)
Good River, Bad River, Little River, Big River
“Mississippi” is a francophone adulteration of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe, Algonquin) name given to the river, indicating something along the lines of how “great” or “big” a river it is. “People are enthralled by it,” Bob Chance, manager of Itasca State Park told the Star Tribune in 2018: “They are amazed that it is that small.” Way down south, the river is an accumulator, full of the life-effluent of an industrialized nation, its cares, concerns, and contaminants. But here, at Lake Itasca, we hear fro (...)
Head Waters at the Headwaters
The United States of America is just under ten million square kilometers in surface area. Its most conterminous landmass is a topology of creases and folds, mountains and ridges, chasms and embankments. These create, among other divides, hydrological continental separations, sloped divisions for watersheds that flow into either the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River or the Missouri-Mississippi complex. These great, tectonic gutters cascade erosive, mineralized waters into the Atlantic Ocean or (...)
Listening to the Mississippi
Listening to the Mississippi is an iterative project that has unfolded since 2013 and currently manifests as a sound composition and traveling listening station. Using underwater recordings gathered in 2015 by artists Monica Haller and Sebastian Müllauer that span the river from the headwaters to the Gulf, listeners are invited to orient themselves to the river through their sense of sound, rather than by sight alone. (...)
The Shape of a River: Mississippi
Students analyzed case studies on the Mississippi, developed their own questions, exchanged with the case study authors, and designed new maps of relationships. The work considered questions such as, what approaches and methods were used for these case studies? Which relationships between human and non-human actors could be observed? What socio-political relationships become visible through the river? Who is being overlooked? What does this have to do with us here? And: how can we make these rel (...)