Of all the global challenges facing the planet there is none so great as our use and abuse of water. All life depends on water and the planet’s water is in crisis. 70% of the planet is covered in water, but only about 3% is freshwater, and only .007% of water is potable. One billion people have no clean water at all. By the end of 2022, multiple water crises converged, oscillating between extremes.

The planet’s glaciers are melting faster than ever thought possible, threatening the world's drinking water. Global coastlines are being reshaped by rising and warming oceans. More than 300 million people are predicted to be displaced over the coming decades. A fundamental question is strategic: if we can’t imagine these planetary water crises, how can we act to change them?

The word ‘forum’ means “a public space beyond the doors.” Fluid Futures aims to engage local and global water issues beyond the doors and outside traditional boundaries. The animating vision of Fluid Futures is to spark creative connections across the environmental humanities, the sciences, the creative and multimedia arts. At the Forum we braid multiple genres, myriad forms of knowledge, speculative imaginings and, above all, strategies for social and political change that radiate beyond the university itself and into the future.

To this end, during 2022 and 2023, the Fluid Futures Forum gathered together participants working on projects situated in the Arctic, Antarctica, Amazonia, British Columbia, Cambodia, Colorado, California, the Gulf of Mexico, Greenland, Iceland, the Pacific Ocean, Japan, the New Jersey Meadowlands, the mid-Atlantic coastline, Louisiana, Kenya, Manhattan, Navaho Land, northern Nevada, the Indian Ocean and Pakistan, among other locations.

Within a collaborative format, Fluid Futures engages critical water-related issues: melting ice and changing oceans; fires, floods and nuclear fluidities; riverine flooding and drowning deltas; visualizing the invisible: atmospheric rivers and ground water; challenging colonial legacies; debates over mass displacements, reparations and relocations; law and property; industrial toxicities, plastics and nuclear contaminations; race, gender and environmental/ climate justice, broadly conceived; indigenous ecologies of knowledges and rights; militarization of water conflicts; multi-media arts and design; community activism and strategies for social and ecological change.

Fluid Futures also centrally engages issues of time and fluidity: amnesias and great forgettings, sensory fluidities, tipping points, questions of grief and mourning; climate and environmental asynchronies, in order to reimagine the past and refigure alternative, fluid futures.

The Covid pandemic has inevitably corralled many interactions into cellular disembodied spaces, with discussions compressed into chats or condensed questions often by invisible participants. Fluid Futures is envisioned as a space to slow down, come to our senses, delve deeply, be curious, puzzled, confused and excited, raise complex questions, and generate a foundation of community and collaboration.

INNOVATIVE FORMAT

Fluid Futures is distinctive in focus, format, and collaborative design.

The Forum is specifically designed to generate and sustain — by engaging intimate, in-depth discussions across the year — collaborative and continuing projects that span the humanities, sciences, and the arts.

Fluid Futures includes three, braided components:

• At intimate, monthly discussions participants share research publications, creative or public writing, art, film, photography, music, data visualization and animation, in order to generate collaborative water projects.

•  Second, Forum participants will host an intermediary, stepping-stone event in the Fall,

•  Third, the Forum will culminate in a three day, immersive, multi-media event: “Fluid Futures: Coming to Our Senses.” We will start on Earth Day, April 22, 2024, and host artists, scientists, musicians, sonic, virtual reality and animation creators to engage core, water-related issues.

Fluid Futures is thus animated by the need to come to our senses and envision alternative ethics of kinship and accountability, imagining how to live with, rather than against, the rising waters, mobilize viable alternatives for meaningful action in an era of climate breakdown and formidable water challenges.