The world’s waterways are in trouble. Rivers have been dammed and dredged to the point of altering the earth’s axis. Industrial and agricultural processes as well as deficient waste management release toxic metals, pesticides, and bacteria into our watersheds. While data centers drink 5 million gallons of water per day, the United Nations projects three out of four people will experience the impacts of drought by 2050. In the face of these and other global water stresses, interdisciplinary approaches to examining the relationships among water, culture, and power, known as hydrocriticism, have taken a freshwater turn. A growing body of scholarship has brought water’s agency to the forefront (Chaturvedi 2025, Neimanis 2017), examining its poetics (Ryan 2021), its memory (Lyons 2018), its capacity to bring communities together (Blackmore 2025) and teach onto-epistemological practices to forge spaces outside of destructive water practices (Davis 2022). Such studies have revealed that water teaches connection where there is separation, modeling collaboration across places and prompting consideration of which knowledges shape collective futures. Water also bears the sediments of time, bringing the weight of historical injustices and enduring forms of harm into the present to pose questions about how to practice the aesthetics, politics and ethics of watery coexistence. 

Given the stakes of these questions, hydrocritical research can and often does follow the porosity of water beyond traditional academic formats and venues. This seminar explores unconventional forms of humanistic and artistic water research beyond scholarly communities asking: What kinds of creative practice bridge academia and activism, allowing broad publics to learn critical water frameworks and academics to learn from water activism already underway? We invite reflections on artistic practice, humanistic collaborations with legal and scientific communities, site-specific and/or virtual “river co-learning arenas” (de Souza 2025) and “water schools,” countermapping processes, data analysis and digital humanities initiatives, and creative practices in hydrocommoning (Blackmore & Ponce de León 2024). We are interested in discussions of successes and failures, tensions, miscommunications, and equivocations, growth through conflict and holding differences. What are the timescales of such work? How can we measure and communicate their successes to the communities involved and to the academic institutions that monitor our scholarly “productivity”? How can we continue to advocate for the need for this kind of public humanities work? 

For more information or questions: [email protected] / [email protected]