Hopper Lecture 2023 - Theories of Water

Theories of Water - Using Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe consciousness to dismantle the present moment. 

What does it mean to listen to water? What does it mean to believe in water? Challenging systems of colonialism through work that is deeply connected with the land.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics,  story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.

 leannesimpson.ca

Guest Speaker

In this talk Leanne Betasamosake Simpson uses Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe consciousness to dismantle the present moment. After three years of pandemic, amplified fascism, freedom convoys, extinct glaciers, police killings, children alone in cages at borders, the resurgence of fascist states, open air prisons for entire peoples, and a dying planet, she is asking herself, what does it mean to, as Rebecca Belmore asks us in her installation Wave Sound, to listen to water? What does it mean, as Dionne Brand writes through her diaspora consciousness and by inventorying the  quotidian disasters of our time, in her epic poem Nomenclature, “to believe in water”? 

Register for the event

This 30th Anniversary Hopper Lecture is made possible through the generous sponsorship of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in honour of its founding president, David Hopper (President 1970-1978). Each year, an eminent international thinker provides a free public lecture about critical current and future issues in international development at the University of Guelph and a second Canadian university. Learn more about the Hopper Lecture and its past speakers