We are pleased to invite you to participate in a Masterclass workshopon June 11-13 that will serve as the pilot for a graduate course cross-taught between the Aarhus University's (AU) Centre for Environmental Humanities (CEH) and the University of Capetown's (UCT) Environmental Humanities South (EHS) Programme.

Entitled "Water, Society, and Ecologies: Towards Situated Knowledges of Flows and Models", this exciting workshop aims to open up a dialogue across the North-South hemispheric divide about the social, ecological and political dilemmas of urban water bodies and infrastructures in both Aarhus and Capetown. It will function as an abbreviated dry-run of the official graduate course that will be cross-listed at AU and UCT in February 2020. We therefore very much look forward to your participation and contributions towards the design of the course and its goals.

Participants in Aarhus and Capetown will initially convene via teleconference to set the framework for our explorations of water in the workshop. This will be followed by field trips for a preliminary investigation of a river in the respective cities. In Denmark, we will spend an afternoon and a morning exploring and researching the Aarhus Å, while Capetown participants explore the Kuils River. This will be followed by short presentations about our initial findings and reflections towards actualizing the full, robust course in 2020.

You can find the full workshop plan below.

Please respond/sign-up by 4 June 2019 at kl. 12 by emailing CEH at ceh@cas.au.dk  

Lunches will be provided. For info about workshop content, please contact Pierre at pduplessis@cas.au.dk

PART 1: URBAN RIVER SYSTEMS, SOURCE TO SEA

Key concepts in Part 1: hydrology; technosphere; ecotoxicity; urban ecology; water in economy; feral ecology; ghosts and monsters; erasure; “water multiple”.

Key skill acquisition in Part 1: GIS; knowledge studies: thinking about thinking; understanding how to work across disciplines and hemispheres and histories by understanding different concerns; introduction to science and technology studies

June 11

Seminar 1. Introductory Seminar (9:00-12:00)

What this course aims to do: Focus on one urban river system in Cape Town and Aarhus, via multiple disciplines. Introduce key concepts and disciplines for knowing water: hydrology; technosphere; ecotoxicity; urban ecology; water in economy; water as a universal solvent.

Seminar 2. Field Trip: Visit to a river: (13:00-16:00)

Mapping what the river does; mapping how the river is used; mapping what goes into the river. Toxicological loads: microbial and chemical, and solids/residues/effluents; Infrastructure for water use. Task: Map the river, and consider how the river is “worlded” differently in different practices/disciplines. What concerns do we bring? What “facts” do those concerns have us pay attention to?

?      Ecologies and Feral Ecologies

?      Bridges, Ports, Piers: What is infrastructure? What does it do? How does it reflect particular political histories? To what extent does infrastructure embed particular political ideas in the landscape?

?      Forms and transformations of water: Harbors, Pools, Fountains

?      Groundwater - seepages and flows

?      Multispecies linkages: birds, insects, farm animals, mud creatures, wild animals, human activity

?      Camps, “Slums,” Settlements, Sanitation: Erasures and presences

June 12

Seminar 3. Continued Research and Preparing  Preliminary Findings (9:00-12:00)

Seminar 4. Presenting Initial Ideas and possible Comparative Webinar, Aarhus and Cape Town (13:-16:00)

Presenting and comparing first impressions of river relationships in Aarhus and Cape Town, which will be the basis of work towards the final project.

June 13

Seminar 5. Workshop Reflections and next steps, Aarhus and Cape Town (9:00-12)

Presenting and comparing first impressions of river relationships in Aarhus and Cape Town, which will be the basis of work towards the final project.

Reading:

Strang, Veronica (2016). Infrastructural relations: Water, political power and the rise of a new 'despotic regime'. Water Alternatives 9(2): 292-318

Olivier, David W. (2017). ‘Cape Town’s water crisis: driven by politics more than drought,’ The Conversation, December 2017, (http://theconversation.com/cape-towns-water-crisis-driven-by-politics-more-than-drought-88191/ accessed 28-09-2018)

Redfield, Peter (2016). Fluid Technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw® and Microworlds of Humanitarian Design. Social Studies of Science 46(2): 159–183.

Gonzalez, Carmen G. (2015).  Bridging the North-South Divide: International Environmental Law in the Anthropocene. SSRN Scholarly Paper, ID 2672460. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2672460, accessed May 22, 2019.

  Ranganathan, Malini, and Carolina Balazs (2015). Water Marginalization at the Urban Fringe: Environmental Justice and Urban Political Ecology across the North–South Divide. Urban Geography 36(3): 403–423.