About

Cultural Water Studies (CWS) is a blog dedicated to understanding the cultural dimensions of water. Water is studied among numerous academic journals with most of the attention given to science and management perspectives. This blog is trying to be different. We want to create a space that not only incorporates scientific perspectives but also foregrounds the way water is understood culturally. Such an entangled narrative produces a way of understanding the world we live in while also locating commonalities with more-than-human beings.

We see this work as being useful to interdisciplinarians who navigate all fields of sciences, arts, and the humanities. With your help, CWS will offer a range of perspectives–both boundary-pushing, practical, and experimental, and probably everything in between.

The creators of Cultural Water Studies currently live and work on the lands of the Dakota people. The Dakota people have lived in the Minneapolis region for thousands of years and have cared for the lands and waters here, and continue to do so. Cultural Water Studies supports the Dakota and Indigenous peoples everywhere as they fight for land, food, and cultural sovereignty.

Disciplines that we believe might be interested in this work (not an exclusive list and in no order):

• Anthropology
• Art
• Art History
• Creative Writing
• Ecology
• Environmental Studies and Science
• Geography
• Histories of Science
• Indigenous Studies, Epistemes, and Ontologies
• Public Policy
• Rhetoric
• Science Studies
• Technical Communication
• Water Management and Science
• Writing Studies
• And more

As a blog, we welcome works-in-progress and developmental works that will eventually be published elsewhere. For example, something might be published here that eventually becomes a conference presentation.

Please reach out to us with ideas for posts or submissions, we look forward to reading them!

Cassidy Schoenfelder

Cassidy Schoenfelder, or Poppy, (Oglala band of the Lakota Sioux) is a Tuscon-based artist, geographer, and art historian. Raised in the Midwest, she traveled to complete her undergraduate degree in art at the University of Montana and then further west where she recently graduated with her Master’s in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Oregon. Her research applies ecocritical analysis to observe artists’ relationships to rural sites and ecoregions, particularly contemporary field-based artist residencies and their participants. As an Indigenous woman actively navigating her reconnecting journey, this intimate time in more-than-human spaces is also complicated by her passion for outdoor recreation. For Schoenfelder, a site’s complexities are often matched by the complexities living within one’s self.

She is currently a PhD student at the University of Arizona in the department of Geography, Development, and Environment.

Stuart Deets

Stuart is a scholar with expertise at the intersection of the visual and cultural with the technical. He thinks a lot about how changes in thought can lead to changes in the real world, but also how the real world should drive our thinking. Stuart is a Ph.D. student studying the rhetoric of science & technical communication at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.