Montreal Waterway Project: Infrastructure and Environment

This project is an experiment in collaborative ethnography that reimagines the city’s relationship with the many waterways that course through and around it against the backdrop of environmental and infrastructural change. Run by Dr. Kregg Hetherington out of the Concordia Ethnography Lab, the Waterways Project funds small initiatives to create ethnographic portraits of pieces of Montreal’s water infrastructure, from sewer collectors to leisure spaces, sacred sites to scenes of colonial expropriation.

The project is multi-disciplinary, but its theoretical focus comes from the growing literature on ethnography of infrastructure in both anthropology and science and technology studies, with a strong emphasis on post-colonial thought. Through modest portraits of humans interacting with water, we hope to contribute to an understanding of how our current age of ecological crisis forces us to rethink the relationship between infrastructure, environment and the many entities that build and inhabit them.