“We are all bodies of water” – Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group, Perceiving Climate Change #2: Water, online event 25-4-24

“…An Alchemist as once profoundly wondrous and entirely banal, water guides our bodies from young to old, from here to there, from potentiality to actuality. Translation, transformation. Plurality proliferates.”

Astrida Niemanis (2012) ‘Hydrofeminism, or on becoming a body of water’ in Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck (eds) Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke: 85-100.

Bodies of water can easily feel just ‘part of the scenery’ – but in times of flood (or drought) they show their power, and pecularity. But we are also bodies of water, our lives are intertwined with the life-giving and deadly potency of water.

This session in the SHU Space & Place Group’s series of online talks around ‘Perceiving Climate Change’ brought together four presentations that each invited us to pay more attention to water, its agency and its changing behaviour in an era of accelerating climate change.

The SHU SPG’s sessions are always informal and playful, but the 70 plus attendees at this event experienced some wonderfully off-beat moments, even by the SPG’s proudly undisciplined terms. The recording captures this (and a couple of compering errors by me – sorry) and its best that I don’t spoil things by trying to explain.

So, here’s the event recording, with the speakers’ abstracts set out below:

Mel Lacey (Associate Professor, Department of Biosciences & Chemistry, SHU)

Nature’s witness: Using citizen science to monitor flood management in the era of climate change.

The South Yorkshire Source to Sea Nature-Based Solutions Partnership advocates a catchment-wide approach to natural flood management. Within Sheffield, a pilot project has been undertaken within the Limb Brook which included members of the public taking photographs at fixed positions over the course and after the project to observe subtle, incremental change to the waterscape over many months. What data does this library of community-generated images hold? What can we learn about impact of the natural flood management intervention on flooding, biodiversity and citizen science from the Limb Valley? And to what extent can the images reveal signs of climate change, and human adaptation to it?

Alban Krashi – Rights of Nature Advocate, Opus Independents

The River Dôn Project: Critical commons as agent and infrastructure

The River Dôn Project brings together a unique collaboration of organisations and citizens both internationally and locally to the region: https://www.theriverdon.org/. Including Dark Matter Labs, Don River Catchment Trust, WeAreOpus, Urban Flows Observatory, Sheffield Hallam University, South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre, Sheffield Data for Good and Lawyers for Nature. Applying a multi-disciplinary approach The River Dôn Project aims to model and demonstrate the future rights of nature, both as an agent and as critical civic infrastructure. It aims to show that a repositioning of critical commons like waterways in our governance, sensemaking and choice-making infrastructures would enhance our collective capabilities to address intersectional crises such as climate breakdown and biodiversity loss in the region.  This talk will explore the ontological, complex and compounding nature of the social, economic and ecological crisis we currently face and the implications inherent in how we construct and deploy proofs of possibility or demonstrations of systemic transformation in response. 

Jon Bridge & Julia Udall (Department of the Natural & Built Environment, SHU)

The Landscape Lab: interdisciplinary engagements with changing upland catchments

The landscape of the Upper Don catchment in South Yorkshire is also known as the ‘Sheffield Lakelands’, a moniker given in the 1950s by an enterprising local tour bus company. The ‘lakes’ in question are artificial – more than a dozen reservoirs built between 1830 and 1930 to supply the rapidly-growing industrial populations downstream. Now a central component of Sheffield’s modern identity as ‘The Outdoor City’, these reservoirs and their hinterlands on the eastern fringe of the Peak District National Park form a complex natureculture in which human and more-than-human interactions are mediated by a hybridised and deeply modified waterscape. The fluctuating reservoir levels provide a graphic barometer in times of drought and floods, but the future of this landscape and its resilience and flourishing in the face of climate change depend on a deeper and richer understanding of the landscape system: its biodiversity and ecological functioning; human perceptions and understanding of the landscape as a basis for relationships of care and conservation; and a new more circular political economy in which value generated within the landscape system is returned to it. Here, we outline an interdisciplinary applied research agenda, the Landscape Laboratory, which seeks to address these critical issues in catchment management. 

Andre Kong (Architect, Andre Kong Studio) www.andrekong.com IG: @andrekongstudio

Stories in Space: Inhabiting the Data of Uninhabitable Futures

This presentation examines three recent projects by Andre Kong Studio, arguing that spatial design and architectural installations can enhance awareness of current and future challenges posed by climate change and related environmental damage. How can we make data more tangible? How can we inhabit data and tell its story? How can we engage communities for meaningful change? Our approach is playful, informative, and accessible. ‘Whale in the Room’ is an installation at the Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange in Penzance, exploring the effects of pollution on coastal communities. Community discussions took place under the looming burden of 380kgs of plastic waste collected from the sea near Penzance. Meanwhile, ‘seeAsaw,’ is an interactive hammock structure made from rescued fishing nets, is part of an educational project for young people on Governors Island, New York City. It aims to raise awareness of ghost nets and their impact on delicate marine environments, orchestrating a collective balancing act. And, ‘A Cautionary Benchmark’ presents inhabitable data in the form of a bench set on two levels, anticipating the storm flood level change predicted by 2030 in the River Thames in London.

Our next online event in this series will be themed around ‘Heat’ and will take place 7.00-9.30pm on Thursday, 13 June 2024. Details of the four presentations for that event, and registration for it, is here: https://shu-spg.eventcube.io/

Image source: Luke Bennett (Otter Valley, East Devon, 2023).