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. (...)
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. (...)
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 (...)
