Thinking with water

"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."--Pub. desc.

Introduction -- Water drawing (version 1.0) (2010) -- Light, sweet, cold, dark, crude (2006-ongoing) -- generation, generations at the mouth -- Water and the material imagination: reading the Sea of Memory against the Flows of Capital -- Water and gestationality: what flows beneath ethics -- Subterranean flows: water contamination and the politics of visibility after the Bhopal Disaster -- Water is Siwlkw -- Sounding a sea-change: acoustic ecology and Arctic Ocean governance -- Frozen refractions: text and image projections on ice (2010) -- Taste the $ource (while supplies last) (2006-present) -- Jellyfish science, jellyfish aesthetics: posthuman reconfigurations of the sensible -- Alsek Lake -- River-adaptiveness in a globalized world -- Conceptual relations: water, ideologies, and theoretical subversions -- Erratics -- The dammed of the earth: reading the mega-dam for the political unconscious of globalization -- Untapping watershed mind -- Pond -- Footbridge at Atwater: a choreographic inventory of effects -- Mapping waters: thinking with watery places.