Fall 2017

Kate Farquhar is a Landscape Designer at Roofmeadow, a landscape architecture and civil engineering firm specializing in innovative green stormwater infrastructure. Her presentation at the Schuylkill Corps Seminar reflected on her time in 2017 when she worked as the coordinator for the Wetland Project and the Ecotopian Toolkit competition, a PPEH led project that invited artists and inventors to propose, design and build their own ecotopian tools, imagining how we all might learn to float–and to live and thrive–on warming and rising river waters along the Lower Schuylkill and elsewhere.

Elizabeth Milroy, PhD is a professor and department head of the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University.Professor Milroy’s current research focuses on the history of cultural spaces, specifically public parks and historic sites in the city of Philadelphia. Her presentation centered around book, The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682-1876, and a discussion of the interpretations of artistic historical representations of space.

David Barnes, PhD teaches the History of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Pennsylvania. This past fall he presented on his work researching the Lazaretto site and the use of narratives and storyscapes to explore social functions of sites overtime.

Excerpt from transcript:
"I tell the story of Mary Ann Ganges, the nine-year-old girl who in 1800 was captured and enslaved in West Africa, then freed as soon as she arrived in the U.S. and indentured as a domestic servant to the quarantine master. I tell the story of Tobias Smith, the mischievous eleven-year-old orphan who was accused in 1805 of starting an epidemic. I tell the story of Dr. Thomas Jefferson Perkins Stokes, the quarantine officer who was prosecuted in 1853 for dereliction of duty. And I tell the story of Mary Riddle, the middle-aged widow who in 1870 saved the Lazaretto from chaos and despair in its darkest hour."

Charles Haas, PhD is the head of Drexel's Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental engineering, His presentation at the Schuylkill River & Urban Waters Research Corps Seminar focused on the microbiology, health and the rivers of Philadelphia prompting discussion on health risks for those who engage recreationally with the rivers and the importance of green infrastructure to mitigate those risks and improve water quality.

Jody A. Roberts (PhD, Science and Technology Studies) is director of Chemical Heritage Foundation’s (CHF) Institute for Research and managing director of CHF West, fostering dialogue on science and technology in society. He presented “From Sensing Change to Grid + Flow Inviting Apprehension of the Environments around us” Dr. Roberts centered his presentation around the discussion of an overview of new approaches, inviting apprehension (Shapiro, Zakariya, and Roberts 2017) that leverage what we might call the critical humanities with aim of preceding our discussions of data and scientific knowing in ways that invite alternative ways of knowing and a more expansive understanding of participation.

Eve Mosher is an artist, interventionist and playworker-in-training currently living and working in New York.  Her presentation at the Schuylkill Corps Seminar lead the group in a discussion around creativity and collaboration on the urban waterways focusing on looking at the future of the water ways as a space of cross disciplinary creativity to tackle challenges and capitalize on opportunities. 

Dylan Gauthier and Kendra Sullivan gave a talk on their work with the boatbuilding and publishing collective Mare Libeurm (www.thefreeseas.org). Founded in 2007, Mare Liberum is a waterborne art and publishing collective that takes as its mission the bridging of dialogues in art, design, activism, and science to remap landscapes, reclaim local ecologies, and observe and record the overlaps of nature, industry, and the polis. Threading with Mare Liberum’s work, the pair's collaborative practice has engaged with urban waterways as overlooked and often neglected spaces and forms of post-natural urban wilderness from which new eco-social pedagogies, infrastructures, literatures, and subjectivities are developed. Their work asks: how might we collectively reimagine public waterways as foundation sites in which to (re)learn an ecology for contemporary crisis and resilience?

Danielle Kreeger, PhD is the Senior Science Director at the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary. Dr. Kreeger lead a discussion on the importance of natural infrastructure for supplying critical ecosystem services in the tidal Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. The presentation summarized the Partnership’s plans for restoring mussel beds and working them into living shorelines with tidal wetlands, promoting diverse benefits for urban communities