DC Waterscape: The Confluence of Land, People, and Ecology
Team names, titles, and institutions:
Charity Clay, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Xavier University of Louisiana
Kate Howell, Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning in the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University
J.T. Roane, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Geography and Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, Rutgers University
Samantha Rodriguez, Professor of History and Humanities, Houston Community College
Format (can be scaled up or down depending on graduate, upper undergraduate, or first year undergraduate students):
Pre-readings (critical ethnography, etc.)
Visit place thinking about what you see, hear, feel, signage, etc. (groups of four/five going to the six different places and taking field notes)
Reflections (what made you comfortable and uncomfortable, initial reactions, etc.)
Critical Place-making Readings/archival research/cultural digital sites (critical map analysis)
Revisit place or go to new place with newly acquired critical place-making lens, thinking about the issues: gentrification, ability to self-determine, ability to claim sovereignty, pollution, housing insecurity, etc. (field notes/also thinking about guided tour)
Students across groups interview each other as a means of reflecting and digging into notions of critical place-making (oral histories)
Final reflections via a Storymap or Adobe Creative Cloud Express (can be tailored to field).
Take aways both field specific and interdisciplinary (glossary)
A. Introduction
This module asks students to critically examine the conjunction of the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers in Washington, DC. While this is in part a consideration of the literal place where these two tidal bodies meet, it is also a metaphorical conjunction (as well as a point of disjunction) where various historical geographies converge and diverge to reveal unique aspects of the region’s cultural, planned, and vernacular uses of the water and the waterfront. In order to facilitate the discussions and exercises planned for this module, we want to center this site as a waterscape—here a conceptualization combining the geological features and processes of the water-land interface as well as the overlapping historical uses of this water-land interface combining habitation, labor, and leisure that have created competing demands shaping urban life.[1] In the Summer of 2022, when we began creating this module, the waterscape joined at this meeting was defined in large measure by two poles. On the one hand, the area has been shaped by redevelopment and gentrification in Southwest Washington just west of the conjunction. This includes large-scale private redevelopment ventures that center consumption. One of our group members suggested that this area looked like a mall or other similar development. This is of note considering the ways that large scale commercial interests share techniques and architectural designs for commercial development in exurban areas and in urban redevelopment/ gentrification schemes across the US and beyond. On the other hand, just east of the conjunction, near the Anacostia neighborhood, a large federally maintained public park defines the waterfront. This area is notable for the contemporary absence of large-scale commercial redevelopment. Whereas non-consumer-oriented activities are explicitly prohibited in Southwest segments that have endured gentrification and redevelopment, the public park continues to serve as site for various non-commercial uses including fishing, boating, roller skating, and other free activities that combine youth, adults, and seniors. This boundary is highly racialized and while Black Washingtonians and tourists often use the redeveloped waterscape for nightlife, this area is not dominated by a Black sense of place. On the other hand, the eastern section of this waterscape defined by the park, continues to be defined by a Black sense of place. By this we do not mean to inhere or naturalize the conflation of public and Black but rather to highlight the intergenerational and mixed uses that play out here outside of commercialism and exclusion. Nor do we mean to reproduce the Federal government management as the polar opposite of commercial development. The state is also a settler-corporate institution. We understand these ongoing Black uses and senses of place as potentially generative in relation to landback and Indigenous sovereignty. We want students to contemplate how Black senses of place might foster mutuality with indigenous (Piscataway) practices of stewardship and how these might rewrite the present and future of urban ecology. These practices generate from Black uses rather than strictly from the brick-and-mortar structure maintained by the state (citing discussion with Melanee on June 29). A decolonial future requires us to think generatively with Black and Indigenous histories of the landscape and the future of the the city, cities, and habitation of these places through their waterscapes
In order to aid students in engaging this conjunction and the differences articulated across it without reproducing the settler-conquistador epistemology of place often embedded in sociological, urbanism, and planning methods where observation heightens differentiation and often intentionally or unintentionally allies itself with the processes of displacement associated with racial capitalism and commercialization, we want to begin the unit with a series of critical questions. How can we attend to and create methods and frameworks that open alternative cartographies and practices of the waterscape? What is opened in triangulating sources related to Black and Indigenous histories and expressive cultures, ritual practices, and everyday uses with settler-conquistador renderings that seek to tame and colonize the waterscape? How might analyzing indigenous and Black visions of the waterscape together, without centering reference to government cartographies or those of developers articulate an ecological, social, and geographic otherwise? What are the politics of our observation and the potential ethical pitfalls of highlighting this conjunction in the context of the absence of or our ignorance of concrete land back initiatives and reparations? How do we honor and respect that opacity or hiddenness to full transparency was and is often an intended feature of Indigenous and Black waterscapes, their cultivation, and use? What are the alternative uses of techniques, methods, and technologies of cartography that might be employed decolonially?
We recommend a field trip to Piscataway Park with a tour guide from the Piscataway Tribe. The foremost historical layer of this waterscape is its inhabitance by the Indigenous Piscataway peoples who while severely diminished by the forces of settler colonialism, genocide, and slavery, continue to lay claims to this area. Not far from the conjunction, in a similar site that served as the Piscataway’s primary territorial seat at the time of contact with first Spanish traders and later English conquistador-settlers, called Moyaons (joining of waters), the Piscataway Nation ingeniously utilized and cultivated the variegated land and water-based resources to survive and thrive for time in memorium. The conjunction of the Anacostia and Potomac further up served as their primary trading area with other Indigenous nations from further North and West.
We cannot disconnect George Washington’s desires for the new US capital to become a great emporium (Phylicia Bell) at the end of the eighteenth century from this historical use by the Piscataway nation. Conquistador-settler relationships to the waterscape and its myriad uses most often violently reterritorialized Indigenous ones rather than generating a new use. This is critical because it serves as an important thread throughout this unit, where settlers and their institutions including the state continue to locate other peoples’ uses of waterscapes, reterritorialize them, and subsequently erase and deny the previous use that prompted collective desire for violent usurpation. The Piscataway continue to grapple with their sovereignty and the issues connected to enduring settler-conquistador practices of place. The Accokeek Foundation is a critical voice in seeking to reimagine Indigenous futures for this waterscape. You can read more about their efforts at restoring Indigenous values and care practices for the land and water here: : https://www.accokeek.org/preservation).
Here are important resources generated by the Piscataways that are a necessary engagement prior to any of the field trips:
Piscataway and the Indigenous Waterscape
The Flickering Flame: The Life and Legacy of Turkey Tayac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06ix1cQPih8
Conversation with Dr. Gabrielle Tayac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06ix1cQPih8
Accokeek Foundation Land River Series Recap (Addressed Black and Indigenous Stories): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLIcpszbJ1k
Native American Tribe Once Called DC Home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/11/22/native-american-tribe-once-called-dc-home-its-had-no-living-members-centuries/
Piscataway Celebrate New Status with Pride: https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/bs-md-piscataway-meeting-20120602-story.html
The American Indian Response to Injustice and a Dire Situation (Interview with Dr. Gabrielle Tayac): https://collections.digitalmaryland.org/digital/api/collection/saac/id/36567/download
B. Bibliography
Dawson, Kevin. Undercurrents of Power : Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
(Examines the historical nature of African and Diasporic swimming and canoeing technologies)
Rountree, Helen. Fishing and Shellfishing by Early Virginia Indians. (2021, February 25). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/fishing-and-shellfishing-by-early-virginia-indians. (accessed March 10, 2022)
(Describes uses of waterscape through fishing and shellfishing by Indians in the region)
Golden, Kathryn Benjamin. “‘Armed in the Great Swamp’: Fear, Maroon Insurrection, and the Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp.” The Journal of African American History 106, no. 1 (2021): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1086/712038.
(Theorizes and historicizes “insurgent ecologies” in relation to the Great Dismal Swamp)
King, Tiffany Lethabo. “The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly).” Antipode 48, no. 4 (2016): 1022–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12227.
(Provides a critical analysis of settler-conquistador cartographies)
Hosbey, Justin and J.T. Roane “Mapping Black Ecologies” Current Research in Digital History,https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v02-05-mapping-black-ecologies/
(Critically considers 2D maps in relation to other forms of Black expressive culture’s mapping)
Summers, Brandi Thompson, and Kathryn Howell. “Fear and Loathing (of Others): Race, Class and Contestation of Space in Washington, DC.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43, no. 6 (2019): 1085–1105. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12811.
(Provides a critical overview of gentrification and displacement in Washington, DC critical for understanding the current waterfront)
American Library Association Indigenous Tribes of Washington D.C.: https://www.ala.org/aboutala/indigenous-tribes-washington-dc
Piscataway Conoy Tribe: http://www.piscatawayconoytribe.com/index.html
C. Historical Cartographies and the Waterscape–Preliminary Exercise
This segment of the module is designed to get students to think expansively about the various ways that place and the waterscape are mapped across a range of historical sources. Some of the suggested primary resources derive from early settler renderings of the region and historical planning documents—held together despite their vast temporal and cartographic differences by their continuity in rendering place from the vantage of settler-conquistadors epistemologies of place—seeking to tame earth into land and rendering Indigenous and Black people and communities expendable, exposable, and displaceable. Others of the suggested sources refuse the tradition of the map as a key to taking, exploiting, and displacing, rendering the waterscape from Black and Indigenous senses of place—here not as ahistorical or transhistorical counterpoints to the rendering of the ecotone exploitable; rather, autonomous visions expressed from the vantage of those often collectively condemned to serial, intergenerational displacement, generated through formulations of place that derive from Indigenous and Black relationality exceeding and preceding colonization and slavery. This unit asks students to contemplate what we might be able to learn from triangulating Indigenous, Black, and settler-conquistador sources but also what decentering cartographies reproducing coloniality.
Primary Source Exercises with possible variations:
Resources Documenting Settler-Colonial Visions of Place
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/gmd/gmd385/g3850/g3850/ct004387.jp2
How do we read the demarcation of the Anacostia (The eastern Branch) as marshland in light of the work by Kathryn Benjamin Golden on the Insurgent ecologies of swamps and Kevin Dawson’s interpretation of Black water practices in the region and Tiffany Lethabo King’s instructive interrogation of cartography? Potential exercise might include having students print this map and draw in an alternative cartography of likely maroonage along with the enduring reality of Piscataway inhabitance. This presents an opportunity to directly triangulate sources.
This exercise might be augmented here with using past and contemporary planning maps:
Norfolk And Washington Steamboat Company. Route map of the Norfolk & Washington Steamboat Company: showing the Potomac River, Chesapeake Bay, and adjacent territory in Maryland and Virginia. [Washington, D.C.?: s.n., 192-?, 1920] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/89694335/.
Thom, William Taylor. “The Negroes of Litwalton, Virginia: A Social Study of the ‘Oyster Negro’,”(1900) Bulletin of the U.S. Department of Labor, 351, no. 37-01.
This map of steamship company routes across the region might be generativity used to discuss scale and the differential temporal and spatial ordering of a waterscape derived from steamships. Many steamships in the 1880s forward in Virginia and across the South are in the direct control of railroad magnates so this might also be useful for thinking about the region in the period of the so-called Anthropocene or what Francoise Vergés terms the racial capitalocene’s acceleration considering their powering by fossil fuels. The steamships are also worked especially in Virginia by Black stevedores. This can serve as a way of thinking about the waterscape as it was historically shaped by labor. Also, these steamship lines often owned shucking and picking houses directly connecting them with the food system and with labor exploitation. A potential exercise might be to have students draw arrows to augment the linear teleology rendered in the steamship map from the vantage of Black laborers and in consideration of the older modes of engaging this waterway extending to Indigenous practices of navigation.
Sources Centering a Black Sense of Place
Maps shaped from the vantage of “A Black Sense of Place” and articulated not in 2D projections but in intimacy and relationality between land and water. These resources and guiding questions might be tied with cultural production work, inviting students to generate lyrics, a short play, poetry, or other formats that are writing but which are not bound to a specific end:
What function does the Anacostia River water and its ritual collection play in the imagery and plot of Nina Angela Mercer’s Gypsy and the Bully Door?
Mercer, Nina Angela. “Gypsy & the Bully Door.” Black Renaissance 14, no. 2 (2014): 152–98.
Gil Scott Heron, “Washington, DC”, 1982.
How does the waterscape appear in its presentation through a soundscape by Gil Scott Heron in “Washington, DC?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgVZ4b9O34s&t=6s
What is the imagery of the water in Northeast Groovers’ “Water”, 1994. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceImIHWq1yw
Ecological/ Environmental Justice History Sources
These might be used to augment key themes of pollution and environmental destruction as well as the ongoing work by organizers and activists to challenge the status especially of the Anacostia as “dead” or alternatively as ecologically viable only in relation to settler-conquistador futures/ futurity. If this is the chosen area of focus, you could consider having students charting a timeline of different actions through newspapers and environmental reports documenting the pollution of the Anacostia and the activism this inspired.
https://lccn.loc.gov/2010532216
Koterba, Michael T. Pesticides in groundwater in the Anacostia River and Rock Creek watersheds in Washington, D.C., 2005 and 2008 / by Michael T. Koterba, Cheryl A. Dieter, and Cherie V. Miller ; prepared in cooperation with the District Department of the Environment. Reston, Va. : U.S. Dept. of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, 2010.
vi, 90 p. : col. ill., col. maps ; 28 cm.
TD427.P35 K68 2010
ISBN: 97814113294231411329422
Ruben, Barbara. "Restoring Washington's Watersheds." Environmental Action, Spring, 1993, 32,
Smith, Michael A. "Environmental Justice Needed for Anacostia." Afro - American Red Star, Apr 01, 1995.
Wright, James. "Anacostia River Still an Environmental Hazard." Afro - American Red Star, Apr, 2007.
Taylor, Alexis. "28 Years After Clean Water Act, Anacostia River More Toxic than Ever." Afro - American Red Star, Jul, 2011.
Bennett, Tracey Gold. "Fishing on the Anacostia Recipe for Toxic Soup?" Washington Informer, Aug, 2011.
"Environmental Youth Summit Focuses on Restoring DC's Anacostia Watershed." Muslim Journal, Jul 10, 2015.
Nufar, Avni and Fischler Raphaël. "Social and Environmental Justice in Waterfront Redevelopment: The Anacostia River, Washington, D.C." Urban Affairs Review56, no. 6 (11, 2020): 1779-1810. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087419835968.
Payton, Randi. "Earth Day Focuses on D.C.'s Troubled Waters." Afro - American Red Star, Apr 20, 1991..
Midler, Aaron. "D.C.'S RIVER WARRIORS." E : The Environmental Magazine, Sep, 2004, 25,
Peay, Carla. "Anacostia River Clean Up Planned." Washington Informer, Aug, 2007.
Wright, Shari'. "Clean River Will Cost You." Washington Informer, Apr, 2009.
"Council Votes in Favor of River Cleanup." Afro - American Red Star, Jun, 2009.
Norton Requests Briefing by Coast Guard and Army Corps on Reported Oil Spill in Anacostia River. Washington: Federal Information & News Dispatch, LLC, 2011.
U.S. Government Announces Settlement to Clean Polluted Area Along Anacostia River. Washington: Federal Information & News Dispatch, LLC, 2011.
Prince, Zenitha. "New Coalition Seeks Cleanup of Anacostia Watershed." Afro - American Red Star, Feb, 2014.
Beaven, Lara. "Rejecting EPA, Court Renews Strict Statutory Approach for Setting TMDLs." InsideEPA.Com's Daily Briefing (Apr 04, 2018).
Endangered Species. Anonymous New York: Columbia Broadcasting System, Columbia Broadcasting System, 2005.
Additional Resources
These are additional sources related primarily to the dominant/hegemonic construction of the waterscape as a zone of extraction that might be adapted or integrated so that students could work collectively on a more extensive history. You might have students consider responding visually, through a critical cartographic practice, on maps and images directly attended by in-class breakdown of each of the various maps chosen for groups or individuals:
Cluss, A, and John Adolphus Bernard Dahlgren. Reconnaissance of "Anacostia" above Wash. Navy Yd. 1861. Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/88690688/.
Fairfax, F. Junction of Potomac and Anacostia rivers. [Washington, D.C.?: s.n., ?, 1854] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/87695756/.
Hains, Peter C, and United States Army. Corps Of Engineers. Map of Anacostia River in the District of Columbia and Maryland. [Washington, D.C.?: Corps of Engineers, 1891] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/88690696/.
Glümer, J. V, and T. Sinclair & Son. Map of the Anacostia River or Eastern Branch region D.C. [Washington?: s.n., 188-?, 1880] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/88690697/.
Young, William S., Lieutenant, A. P Upshur, William B Whiting, M. S Smith, and United States Coast Survey. Map of the Potomac & Anacostia rivers between Washington D.C. & Alexandria Va. 1842. Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/90684609/.
Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. Aerial view of Washington, D.C., looking west from the Anacostia River. Washington D.C. United States, None. [Between 1980 and 2006] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2011634251/.
Highsmith, Carol M, photographer. Aerial view looking north over southeast Washington, D.C., toward Anacostia River. Washington D.C. United States, None. [Between 1980 and 2006] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2015645984/.
Kollner, Augustus, Artist. East branch of Potomac R. Washington. Washington D.C. United States Anacostia River, 1839. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004662006/.
Kollner, Augustus, Artist. East & west branch below Washington. Washington D.C. United States Anacostia River Potomac River, 1839. Sept. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004662008/.
Benham, Henry Washington, Russell, Andrew J, photographer. Pontoon bridge of Gen. Benham, near Navy Yard, Washington, July. Washington D.C. United States Maryland Washington Anacostia River, 1863. July. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004677102/.
Bridge across Eastern branch of Potomac River, Washington, D.C., April. Washington D.C. United States, None. [Photographed 1865, printed between 1880 and 1889] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2013651884/.
King, N. Map of part of S.E. Washington D.C. now occupied by the Navy Yard and adjacent squares. [179-?, 1790] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/88693000/.
Ferrell, John, photographer. Washington, D.C. vicinity. Negro fishing on the Virginia side of the Potomac River below the Chain Bridge. United States Virginia Arlington County, 1942. July. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017764375/.
Delano, Jack, photographer. Negro waiter in Hertzog's seafood restaurant along the waterfront. Washington, D.C. United States Washington D.C. District of Columbia Washington D.C, 1941. July. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017795174/.
Dorr, William S, American Anti-Slavery Society, and Printed Ephemera Collection Dlc. Slave market of America. Washington D.C. Alexandria Virginia, 1836. New-York: Published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, 144 Nassau-street. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2008661294/.
Kollner, Augustus, Artist. Steamboat Wharf, Washington, D.C. Washington D.C. United States, 1839. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004661949/.
Municipal Fish Market. Washington D.C, None. [Between 1915 and 1930] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2006683823/
D. DC Waterscape Oral History Interview
Assignment: In your first field trip, you explored place and were mindful of your initial reactions, what you saw (including signage), what you felt, and what you heard. After reading and gathering primary and secondary critical placemaking sources, you revisited your place with an interrogating perspective. This second field trip allowed you to grapple with notions of Black self-determination, Indigenous sovereignty, the role of the state, gentrification, pollution, environmental racism, and leisure. In this assignment, you will be interviewing a student from another group who visited a place that was different from your own. In doing so, you will gain deeper understandings of landscape and placemaking as well as the convergences and divergences of the DC waterscape.
Recording the interview: You have already completed a practice interview. For this official interview, you will need to audio record the interview (most phones have an AUDIO record option). Please record your interview by audio and not video as your interviewee could feel uncomfortable with a video recording. Also, make sure you have enough storage on your phone to record the interview.
Listening, environment, and total time of interview: When conducting the interview, you should listen attentively and resist the impulse to talk over your interviewee. You should also aim to conduct the interview in a quiet and comfortable situation for your interviewee. Please remember that your interviewee may feel uncomfortable with a video recording and that you should conduct an audio recording. This interview should be twenty to forty minutes in order to have a meaningful and thoughtful oral history.
Taking notes: You will need to take notes on a piece of paper while conducting the interview. These notes are an outline of the answers your interviewee provided to your questions. You do not have to provide everything that was said, but you do need to give me a good idea of what the interviewee said in response to each question. These notes will aid you when creating your final reflections. After writing the notes, you need to type up the notes and submit them when you email the oral history interview. You may need to listen to the interview a couple of times to create good notes that capture the OVERALL responses to each question.
Below are the REQUIRED list of questions for the DC Waterscape Oral History Interview:
1. What is your name? Where were you born? How did you feel growing up in your neighborhood? Ask your interviewee to describe an example.
2. What place did your group visit? What were your initial reactions to this place? Ask your interviewee to describe an example.
3. What did you see (including signage) at the place? Ask your interviewee to describe an example.
4. What did you hear at the place? Ask your interviewee to describe an example.
5. What did you feel at the place (comfortable, uncomfortable, etc.)? Ask your interviewee to describe an example.
6. Did the state define the contours of the place? If so, how? If not, how not? Ask your interviewee to describe an example.
7. In what ways did Black self-determination or Indigenous sovereignty shape the place? Ask your interviewee to describe an example.
8. How did gentrification shape in the place? Ask your interviewee to describe an example.
9. How did pollutants and/or environmental racism factor into the place? Ask your interviewee to describe an example.
10. In what ways did leisure factor into the place? Was there a sense of self-defining leisure, controlled leisure, or both? Ask your interviewee to describe an example.
Resources:
Oral History Association Best Practices: https://www.oralhistory.org/best-practices/#:~:text=Four%20key%20elements%20of%20oral,of%20one%20or%20many%20interviews
Example of How to Do an Oral History: https://crbb.tcu.edu/
Anacostia Oral History Sources:
Anacostia Oral History Project, 1975: https://anacostia.si.edu/collection/archives/sova-acma-09-006
Buzzard Point Oral History Project: https://digdc.dclibrary.org/islandora/object/dcplislandora%3A100992
Buzzard Point is an industrial area in Southwest Washington, DC that is currently being redeveloped. Conducted in 2017, these oral history interviews document family and resident history in the neighborhood, individuals' relationships with the community and the nearby Anacostia River, and experiences with pollution and gentrification. -
We Shall Not Be Moved: Stories of Struggle from Barry Farm-Hillsdale: https://anacostia.si.edu/barryfarm/
Piscataway Oral History Sources:
Conversation with Dr. Gabrielle Tayac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06ix1cQPih8
Accokeek Foundation Land River Series Recap (Addressed Black and Indigenous Stories): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLIcpszbJ1k
E. Final: Story Map Exercise
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/8e2027e1ae74452a8c17230aa0a52678
F. Takeaways
After completing this model, students should apply what they have been critically examining to how their discipline addresses (or fails to address) the guiding questions they have been wrestling with as they gain understanding of the concept of a waterscape. In this vein students will interrogate the glossary of terms relative to their discipline that detail how they define, understand and use terms related to landscape like, site, place, location, space etc. They will share these glossaries with students of other disciplines as an entry point to interdisciplinary (or possibly anti-disciplinary) ways to address ideas of displacement, dispossession, sovereignty, preservation etc. The potential here is for students to create new antidisciplinary languages that are not owned by any singular discipline but represent a convergence of knowledges drawn from various disciplines but used to describe practices that decenter Eurocentric lenses.
[1] This definition derives from a working definition from J.T. Roane’s forthcoming essay “Black Ecologies, Subaquatic Life, and the Jim Crow Enclosure of the Tidewater,” Journal of Rural Studies.
Module D Citation
Clay, C., K. Howell, J. Roane, S. Rodriguez. “DC Waterscape: The Confluence of Land, People, and Ecology, Module D,” (Roberts, A., Way, T. Directors), 2022. Available from Part 1: Black & Indigenous Histories of the Nation's Capital, NEH Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty, Retrieved on (date retrieved) website: https://www.apeopleslandscapehistory.org/syllabus-bank.