THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED IN RESPONSE TO COVID-19 SAFETY CONCERNS.

Queer Ecologies and Brown Commons: Thinking with the Duwamish River
March 18, 2020
Location: Finnriver Cidery and Farm
6-7:30 p.m.
Free, $10 suggested donation

What does it mean for a river to display, strive for, indicate, or desire a future state? What actions and gestures and ways of thought take seriously a river’s agency and the life chances of its plant and animal denizens? This talk will bring us to the rerouted, constricted, and polluted Duwamish River to learn to see its vibrant lifeworlds and hydrologic possibilities. Thinking with José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of brown commons as queer ecologies,  Woelfle-Erskine will present field science and ecopoetics investigations of the past, present, and future river.

Cleo Woelfle-Erskine is a Seattle-based artist-scholar whose work includes photography, video, street theater, and scientific investigation as participatory performance. Cleo’s scientific collaborations with tribes and grassroots groups investigate projects to restore rivers and coastal zones to benefit salmon and recharge groundwater to adapt to changing climates, and have been funded by the Northwest Climate Adaptation Science Center and the National Science Foundation. Cleo is the author, most recently, of “Fishy Pleasures: Unsettling fish hatching and fish catching on Pacific frontiers” (Imaginations 2019) and the forthcoming monograph Underflows: Transfiguring Rivers, Queering Ecology (UW Press).

This program is made possible through a National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant and is presented by Centrum in partnership with the Fort Worden Public Development Authority (PDA), Jefferson Land Trust, Finnriver Cidery Farm, and Clemente.