Water Stories is a multidimensional performance project conceived of and produced by Dr. Tru Leverette Hall and Dr. Maureen McCluskey. The project highlights energizing synergies between the humanities and sciences and explores how the arts can help propel environmental justice work and vice versa. This innovative research initiative allows students from multiple disciplines to engage their creativity on-site at multiple natural locations in Jacksonville and is an extension of our productive collaborations with Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), Eartha’s Farm and Market, UNF’s Digital Humanities Institute, and St. John’s Riverkeeper (SJR)

The larger project of which Water Stories is part—Resilient Ribault—is being designed to expand connections between Jacksonville, Florida’s Ribault River/Moncrief Road residents and nature, to study and restore the environmental and economic assets of the district, and to better memorialize its history and preserve its cemeteries. The river itself serves as both a metaphorical and literal path of connection, communal empowerment, self-sufficiency, and resiliency. Likewise, the area’s cemeteries—historically neglected by the city—exist as both natural spaces and sites of ancestral-communal connection. As such, they too need documentation and preservation, as do the stories of those interred there.

The interdisciplinary connections among the project collaborators highlight the synergies among oral and public history, ethnography, race, environmental justice, and the arts. The project collaborators understand the need for the arts in environmental justice work, as the benefits of the arts are continual and communal. The arts help gather communities, help translate environmental land memory, help frame conversations on environmental justice, and help foster communal healing and resilience through shared embodied experience. Additionally, Jacksonville faces an ongoing need for more local stories and community connections. This project sheds light on the value of community and the importance of threading human connections to nature and each other through the arts. Like the griot (storyteller) figure of the African diasporic tradition, Water Stories will assert that the stories we tell (and who has a platform to tell them) shape our environmental justice work and vice versa. Water Stories will be showcased to local and regional audiences (multiple venues and accessibility levels) and will provide long term availability by being filmed and showcased via digital platform.

Thank you to our Partners: