LAN3702HS
Instructors: Jane Wolff

To walk through Toronto is to encounter water’s signatures and memoranda: they connect time immemorial to this morning’s frost. But in just over two centuries, since the British established a military garrison here, settler society has put the water itself out of sight and out of mind. Today, too many Torontonians fail to recognize water’s constant and sustaining presence in the landscape. In the climate emergency, as water returns to the surface in ever more frequent floods, too many people fail to understand that it has been there all along. Resilience is more than a technical problem. It means acknowledging, renewing, and repairing our relationships with water, individually and collectively.

This course will ask students to recognize the presence of water in the city and in their own lives.  Course readings and field-based exercises will consider plural scales from the body to the city; engage the material and immaterial manifestations of Toronto’s waters; and work toward an understanding of our relationships and responsibilities to these waters through Indigenous, Western, and non-Western worldviews. The goal: to connect fragments into stories that shed light on water’s living presence in the city.