Memory, Place and Community in Global Water Systems Working Group

Jason Kelly

Member of the Scientific Steering Committee and Chair of the Memory, Place, and Community in Global Water Systems Working Group

Dr. Jason Kelly is the inaugural Director of the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute (IAHI) and an Associate Professor of History. His research focuses on the intersections of art, science, and philosophy.  He is the author of The Society of Dilettanti (Yale University Press, 2010) and articles in Journal of British Studies, the British Art Journal, the Walpole Society, and more. He currently leads a major collaborative project, Rivers of the Anthropocene, which brings together an international team of scientists, humanists, and policy makers to study global river systems since 1750. He teaches courses on eighteenth-century Europe; history of science; digital humanities; and environmental history. Dr. Kelly is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London; the 2013 recipient of IUPUI's Research Trailblazer Award; and a two-time recipient of the IU Trustees Teaching Award (2011, 2008).

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Human culture and water are inextricably tied together. Understanding them together can offer deep insights into our pasts and our future.

Gaia Vince

Member of the Memory, Place and Community in Global Water Systems Working Group

Gaia Vince is a journalist, broadcaster, and author specializing in science, the environment, and social issues. She travels the world meeting the people, plants, and animals that make up our unique living planet. She writes news, opinion, and feature articles for a variety of different outlets, including the BBC, The Guardian, New Scientist, Australian Geographic, Science, Seed, and she researches and presents science documentaries for BBC radio. She has been the news editor of the science journal Nature and the opinion, analysis and features editor for the journal Nature Climate Change, which publishes the latest research in the field. Before that, she was an editor at New Scientist magazine.

In 2015, Gaia won the prestigious Royal Society Winton Prize for her book “Adventures in the Anthropocene, a study of human plundering of Earth’s resources”.

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Further information will be available in due course.

Ninad Bondre

Member of the Memory, Place, and Community in Global Water Systems Working Group

Ninad Bondre is the Managing Editor of Elevate Scientific, a science communications company based in Sweden. He was the Senior Science Editor and Advisor for the International Geopshere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) from 2009 through 2015. Before that, he was an associate editor of Nature Geoscience, the highest-ranking journal in the multidisciplinary geosciences.

Ninad’s interests include the science and politics of climate change, climate communication, gender and the Anthropocene. While working on IGBP’s final synthesis, he sought to take the Anthropocene concept outside its biophysical confines by collaborating with social scientists and humanists. He continues to engage actively with diverse academic and non-academic communities to explore the many dimensions of the Anthropocene. He has published several blog posts and research articles on this topic, and in December last year he chaired a “Great Debate” Union Session at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting. Ninad holds a doctoral degree in geology from Miami University, Ohio, USA

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Further information will be available in due course.

Nina Elder

Member of the Memory, Place and Community Working Group

Nina Elder is an artist, adventurer, and arts administrator. She grew up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and New Mexico where she cultivated love for the land and curiosity about its use. After earning an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, Nina returned to northern New Mexico where she co-founded an off-the-grid artist residency program called PLAND: Practice Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation followed by several years as the Residency Program Director at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Nina’s work is exhibited and collected nationally, and has been included in publications such as Art in America, VICE Magazine, and New American Paintings.

Nina examines historic land use and its cycles of production, consumption, and waste. Mines, bombing ranges, and junk heaps are source material for her landscape paintings and representational drawings that explore the line between land and landscape, beauty and banality. She has backpacked into mines, travelled to Arctic Cold War military sites, and obtained government clearance to tour the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. She has drawn with radioactive charcoal, ore from mines, and dam silt. Her personal experience of research is reflected through performative, narrative presentations that are equal parts travel log, artist talk, personal story-sharing, and scientific inquiry, as well as a call for greater curiosity and engagement with the world.

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Further information will be available in due course.

Scott Ashley

Member of the Memory, Place and Community in Global Water Systems Working Group

Scott Ashley is a historian of the end of the Roman world and the emergence of the early middle ages in Europe. His interest in this period stems from his childhood in the North-East of England and memories of family visits to Hadrian’s Wall, Lindisfarne and the Anglo-Saxon churches that dot the region. That interest has taken him far afield, from Oxford to the United States and Hungary, before taking up a full-time position at Newcastle in 2002.

His major research interests lie in the history of Europe from late-antiquity to the eleventh century. Trained as a historian of Anglo-Saxon England and the Carolingian Empire, he has subsequently expanded his work into the history and archaeology of Scandinavia and the Viking diaspora, from Russia and the Islamic world in the east to the North Atlantic and the American coasts in the west. He is also interested in world history, and the possibilities of developing comparative perspectives across medieval Eurasia, Africa and the Americas.

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Further information will be available in due course.

Mark Kesling

Member of the Memory, Place and Community in Global Water Systems Working Group

Mark Kesling is a pioneering artist and designer in the field of museum education and design for more than 30 years. He has designed, created and managed major exhibits and installations in museums including The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, The Carnegie Museum, The Exploratorium, and the Children’s Museum of Wilmington.

While at the Museum of Science and Industry, Mark was responsible for leading the museum’s long-range planning efforts to redesign its exhibits and programs. He collaborated with local neighborhood leaders, city leaders, and visionaries from a variety of science and engineering fields throughout North America. He pioneered the early use of mobile computers in exhibit interpretation, developed helium filled vehicles that enabled visitors to see inside planes hanging from the museum’s ceiling, and was successful in updating exhibits for the Navy, coal and food industries.

As the founder and CEO of the daVinci Pursuit, Mark continues to provide leadership through the design of a “museum without walls”. He possesses a unique set of skills, combining art with science in ways that engage learners of all ages. He works with neighborhood, city, institutional, artist and educational partners to create science installations in some of the most neglected neighborhoods in Indianapolis. Mark holds a MS in Science Education from Butler University and a BS in Elementary and Art Education from Indiana University. In addition to his work with the daVinci Pursuit, Mark is part-time instructor at Butler University in Urban Ecology

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Further information will be available in due course.

James “Jai” Syvitski

Member of the Memory, Place and Community in Global Water Systems Working Group

Professor James “Jai” Syvitski received doctorate degrees (Oceanography & Geological Science) from the University of British Columbia in 1978, where he developed a quantitative understanding of particle dynamics across the land-sea boundary. He held a variety of appointments within Canadian universities (1978-1995: U. Calgary, Dalhousie U., U. Laval, Memorial U., and INRS-oceanologie) and was a Senior Research Scientist within the Geological Survey of Canada at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (1981-1995). James served as Director of INSTAAR from 1995-2007, and presently holds faculty appointments in in Geological Sciences, Applied Mathematics, Atmosphere and Ocean Sciences, Hydrological Sciences, and Geophysics. He has over 500 publications, including authorship or co-authorship of 65 peer-reviewed books, and has served in various editorial positions for many international journals. James has taken leadership roles in large International Projects (e.g., SAFE, ADFEX, SEDFLUX, COLDSEIS, STRATAFORM, EuroSTRATAFORM, CSDMS), and served as an advisor for NSF, ONR, ARCUS, LOICZ, IGBP, IUGS, INQUA, SCOR, GWSP, and various energy, mining, and environmental companies.

James works in the forefront of computational geosciences: sediment transport, land-ocean interactions and Earth-surface dynamics. He is presently Executive Director of the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System, an international effort in 68 countries to develop, support, and disseminate integrated computer models to the broader Geoscience community. James chaired ICSU’s International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (2011-16) that provides essential scientific leadership and knowledge of the Earth system to help guide society onto a sustainable pathway during rapid global change. He received the Royal Society of Canada 2009 Huntsman Medal for Outstanding Achievements in Marine Science, is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and will accept the SEPM Francis Shepard Medal in 2016 and an Honorary Doctor of Science in Sustainability from Newcastle University in 2016.

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Further information will be available in due course.

Fiona McDonald

Member of the Memory, Place and Community in Global Water Systems Working Group

Dr. Fiona P. McDonald is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Arts and Humanities Institute. Fiona completed her PhD (2014) in the Department of Anthropology at University College London (UCL) in visual anthropology & material culture. Her dissertation, Charting Material Memories: a visual and material ethnography of the transformations of woollen blankets in contemporary art, craft, and Indigenous regalia in Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the United States was undertaken as both an historic and contemporary visual and material ethnography of the material nature and transformations of woollen (trade) blankets that were produced in the United Kingdom since the seventeenth century. Her work addresses both historical and contemporary uses of woollen blankets through a direct examination of the pluralistic histories that things and objects have when re-worked and recycled by contemporary artists and customary makers in North American and Aotearoa New Zealand. Fiona is currently translating this research in to a book project. Fiona is the co-founder of Ethnographic Terminalia Collective (ETC) (ets.2009) (http://ethnographicterminalia.org/), an international curatorial collective that curates exhibitions at the intersections of arts and anthropology. ETC have curated and organized exhibitions and workshops across North America (Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, Montreal, New York, Austin, Chicago, Denver, and Vancouver) where they aim to move academic research beyond the academy through public engagement.

Fiona’s research interests are: Water, Energy studies, Indigenous material and visual culture, repatriation, oral histories, contemporary Indigenous art, curatorial theory, performance theory, and museum studies.

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Further information will be available in due course.

 

Philip Scarpino

Member of the Memory, Place and Community in Global Water Systems Working Group

Philip Scarpino is a professor of public history and Director of Public History at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. He is also Director of Oral History for Indiana University’s Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence. He is the author of “Great River: An Environmental History of the Upper Mississippi River,” and co-editor of “Public History and the Environment.” He has written, spoken and consulted widely on public and environmental history. In 2010, he completed a book-length analysis of cultural resources on Isle Royale National Park for the National Park Service. Scarpino served as historical advisor on Conner Prairie’s recently installed Nature Walk and 1863 Civil War Journey. He teaches American history, environmental history, historic preservation, and public history and also leads oral history projects for the Tobias Center and other organizations. Scarpino earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Montana and both a master’s and doctorate degree from the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Further information will be available in due course.

Aaron Cooke

Member of the Memory, Place and Community in Global Water Systems Working Group

Aaron Cooke is an architectural designer and project manager at the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks Alaska.  He designs, builds, and monitors experimental prototype buildings in challenging physical environments across Alaska, and has collaborated with design groups in Russia, Canada and Antarctica to test new methods of building durable and energy-efficient homes in the circumpolar regions.  He believes that northern environmental conditions and northern culture are inseparable factors that must both be equally reflected in architecture and design in order for it to be successful.

Aaron’s university studies emphasized a specialization in rural development and Arctic responses to architectural form.  This emphasis on northern built form led him to study at the Novosibirsk State Technical University in Siberia and at the Danish International Studies Institute in Copenhagen.  He received his Masters Degree in Architecture from the University of Cincinnati and completed his thesis work as the Design Lead on the Mertarvik Evacuation Center, where he worked with the community of Newtok to develop an environmentally and culturally sustainable facility that will serve as a place of refuge as the community relocates from their current eroding site to a safer location. He was born and raised in Alaska.

Water Future Is Important To Me Because…

Further information will be available in due course.