Rachel havrelock bio
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Rachel Havrelock
Bio
Rachel Havrelock is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she also directs The Freshwater Lab, an environmental humanities initiative focused on the North American Great Lakes and environmental justice.
The Freshwater Lab is an initiative to communicate Great Lakes vatten issues to the general public, create tools to visualize the current state and future scenarios of water sources, engage unaffiliated groups in water planning- and utbildning a new generation of Great Lakes leaders. With a focus on the Great Lakes basin, the Freshwater Lab reaches outward to build relationships with water stewards from other parts of the world.
The Freshwater Lab has produced two digital storytelling platforms:
Freshwater Stories concerns Lake Michigan as it opens eyes to the pressing vatten issues of the twenty-first century and offers a tool in which anyone can begin to learn about their water.
The Backward River chronicles how the Chicago River c
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Rachel Havrelock
Rachel Havrelock (Photo: Jenny Fontaine/University of Illinois Chicago)
Rachel Havrelock&#;s interest in water sharing as an approach to Middle East peacemaking was reinforced while completing her book &#;River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line,&#; which considers the Jordan River as a border in the Bible, Judaism, Christianity and Jewish and Palestinian national movements.
Her current research is on the role of oil extraction and infrastructure in the militarization of the Middle East and examines how regional water management could transform the landscape.
Havrelock addresses local matters as co-founder and principal investigator for the Freshwater Lab, a UIC-based consortium for humanities and social science research that examines issues related to water, energy and natural resources in the Great Lakes region.
Other scholarly interests include biblical literature, energy and culture, and cultural geography.
SparkTalks: Rachel Havrelock (video)
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Rachel Havrelock
Intention: By focusing on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, I want to return to the city’s original sin of sending its waste south to afflict downstate Illinois, southern states and the Gulf of Mexico. The reason for taking up the early 20th Century sin now is that the environmental and public health abuses have mounted. The Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico fed, in part, by Chicagoland’s wastewater has grown to the size of New Jersey and shows no signs of abating. Flooding in Chicago and throughout Illinois has become an expected disaster even as other parts of the Midwest and West face crippling droughts. A water system created to allow industries to pollute with impunity and metropolises to foist their wastes on vulnerable communities is out of date and dangerous in the 21st Century. Confronting the shortcomings of the past is a key step to re-envisioning a better future in Chicago, Illinois and the Great Lakes watershed. I look to culture and storytelling a