How do we pull together those with skills and talents steeped in disciplinary knowledge and inhabitant experience to interpret and respond appropriately to the radical uncertainties of rivers and lakes enacting climate change extremes? Based on her ethnography of flood control in urbanized Manitoban floodplains, Stephanie Kane identifies and recasts key aspects of traditional expert-inhabitant forecasting. She proposes touchstones for a place-based/planet-informed path forward that affectively and effectively grounds engineering, science and law in environmental and social justice.

About the speaker: Stephanie C. Kane is a cultural anthropologist and Emerit Professor of International Studies in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. Her earlier book on water and cities is entitled Where Rivers Meet the Sea: The Political Ecology of Water (2012, Temple). Her most recent book, Just One Rain Away: The Ethnography of River-city Flood Control (2022 McGill Queen’s) brings together diverse experimental fieldwork-based methods. Using geoscience and flood forecasting, Kane interprets the perspective of water and ice as earth-shaping riverine actors who encounter collective humans in the form of cities. By drawing on official post-disaster reports, novels, a play, personal experience narratives and an emergency press conference, Just One Rain Away writes humanity’s existential climate-changing moment into the peculiar place-based intersection of historical and geological time.