As a life-giving but also potentially destructive substance, water occupies a prominent place in the imagination. At the same time, water issues are among the most troubling ecological and social concerns of our time. Water is often studied only as a "resource," a quantifiable and instrumentalized substance. Thinking with Water instead invites readers to consider how water - with its potent symbolic power, its familiarity, and its unique physical and chemical properties - is a lively collaborator in our ways of knowing and acting. What emerges is both a rich opportunity to encourage more thoughtful environmental engagement and a challenge to common oppositions between nature and culture. Drawing from a pool of contributors with diverse backgrounds, Thinking with Water presents the work of critics, scholars, artists, and poets in an invitation to pay more attention to the aqueous aspects of our lives. Contributors include: Aelab (Gisele Trudel, UQAM and Stephane Claude, Oboro), Stacy Alaimo (University of Texas at Arlington), Andrew Biro (Acadia University), Mielle Chandler (York University), Cecilia Chen (Concordia University), Dorothy Christian (University of British Columbia), Adam Dickinson (poet, Brock University), Max Haiven (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design), Janine MacLeod (York University), Daphne Marlatt (poet, British Columbia), Don McKay (poet, Newfoundland), Emily Rose Michaud (Artist, Wakefield, Qc.), Astrida Neimanis (Linkoping University), Sarah Renshaw (artist, Rhode Island), Shirley Roburn (Concordia University), Melanie Siebert (poet, University of Victoria), Jennifer B. Spiegel (Concordia University), Veronica Strang (Durham, UK), Rae Staseson (Concordia University), Rita Wong (Emily Carr University of Art and Design), and Peter C. van Wyck (Concordia University).

An exploration of the relationship between water's cultural meanings and urgent ecological issues.

About the Author
Cecilia Chen is an architect and a doctoral candidate in communications at Concordia University. Janine MacLeod is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Astrida Neimanis is a visiting scholar of the Posthumanities Hub at Linkoping University, Sweden.

Reviews
"This volume is varied and engaging on numerous levels, balancing well the different types of contributions of art, poetry, and scholarship. The diversity in the contributors' backgrounds adds to the richness and distinctiveness of the volume as a whole...[and] suggests the importance of interdisciplinarity when approaching a subject as broad and fundamental as water." The Goose "A richly interconnected, interdisciplinary account of how diverse human cultures have valued and devalued, and lived with and against, the bodies of water that surround, course through and sustain them." Green Letters "A remarkable edited and interdisciplinary collection of strong stories, critical essays, art installations, and poetry that destabilize, defamiliarize, and seek to rechart dominant ways of thinking about water." Resilience



Book Information
ISBN 9780773541801
Author Cecilia Chen
Format Paperback
Page Count 368
Imprint McGill-Queen's University Press
Publisher McGill-Queen's University Press