Storying Water

What stories does water make possible? Storying Water convenes Gabriella Freeman, Laura Magnusson, Liz Miller, Polina Shubina, and Kathleen Vaughan, Concordia research-creation scholars, including students and professors, who each work with water as an integral part of their practice, in conversation with Barbara Lorenzkowski. Through a series of short vignettes intended to animate the discussion to follow, each panelist will tell a story of how water informs their work. The Saint Lawrence River emerges as a shared point of connection across many of these stories.

Together, the presentations and discussion engage questions concerning careful listening, environmental awareness, flow, memory, embodiment, and sources and methods of storymaking. Barbara Lorenzkowski, whose recognition of the connections among the panelists' watery practices inspired this conversation, will moderate the discussion. 

How can you participate? Join us in person by or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions or if we can make this event more accessible for you: Contact us at info.4@concordia.ca

Gabriella Freeman

“Raconte-moi le Ruisseau: An Oral History of the Urban Stream”

Gabriella Freeman is a textile artist, outdoor educator and grief counsellor starting their PhD at Concordia in Social and Cultural Analysis. Their experiences as a canoe guide in national parks and as an outdoor educator on the Lachine Canal have tuned them in to waterways as sites of meaning. Experiencing both "natural" and "wild" waterways, as well as “artificial” and “domesticated” urban waters has led them to interrogate such binaries and examine the ways in which humans relate to urban green and blue spaces. In their research, they approach the city through the urban wild, viewing its human residents as urban fauna. They recently published the oral history soundwalk Raconte-moi le Bois-des-Pères in the context of their undergraduate Honours Thesis (2025-2026), featuring resident storytellers who inhabit and relate to an urban woodland where water once flowed. In future research, they seek to expand this soundwalk to follow the paved-over flow of the “lost” Ruisseau de la Grande Prairie in support of the grassroot project of “La Trame Verte et Bleue de l’Est” linking greenspaces into an ecological corridor across the neighbourhoods of Montreal’s East, down to the Saint-Lawrence River.  

Laura Magnusson

Laura Magnusson is a Montreal-based artist pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University. Working across video, drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance, she develops artistic strategies to communicate lived impacts of sexual violence and its institutional aftermaths. A trained scuba diver who has filmed underwater in Iceland and Mexico, Magnusson thinks, writes, and creates performative work at depth, exploring how underwater embodiment supports the processing and communication of traumatic knowledge. Magnusson has presented work in exhibitions, film festivals, and conferences across Canada and internationally with support from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Doctoral Fellowship) and the Canada Council for the Arts. She served as a 2025-26 Concordia Public Scholar. 

Liz Miller

Documentary Encounters in the Hochelaga Archipelago 

Elizabeth (Liz) Miller is a documentary filmmaker, educator, and Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. She uses immersive and participatory documentary practices to connect personal experience with pressing social and environmental challenges. She has developed documentary projects such as The Shore Line,SwampScapes, and WasteScapes to engage audiences in timely issues such as climate change, water, waste, and environmental justice.Miller is co-author, with Steven High and Edward Little, of Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice. 

Polina Shubina

Polina Shubina was born and raised on the shores of the Baltic Sea and has a background in theatre, puppetry, visual arts, and sailing. She is now pursuing her PhD in the Individualized program at Concordia University, with research-creation that explores sailing as a method and sailing ships as media for a transdisciplinary inquiry, community building, and outreach today. She has recently been working on several research-creation projects along the St. Lawrence River and delving into movement practice as a method of research. 

Kathleen Vaughan

Kathleen Vaughan (MFA, PhD) is an artist and academic with a trans-disciplinary orientation to questions of place and belonging, of "mattering" and matter. In studio and community projects, she balances her love for waters, green spaces, and skies with critical engagement, and often uses walking and mapping as method and form. Her work includes textile practices such as digital and hand embroidery, as well as photography, audio, video, and text. She chooses materials with a low environmental footprint, that ideally will biodegrade without adding plastic to our world. She is Professor of Art Education at Concordia University.

Barbara Lorenzkowski

Barbara Lorenzkowski is an oral historian of childhood and youth whose work explores the ways in which global processes of migration, displacement, and violence have shaped small people’s lives in outsized ways. She recently published the co-edited anthology Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond (with Kristine Alexander and Andrew Burt, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023) and is currently completing a FQRSC-funded book project on The Children’s War, a large-scale oral history project on children’s sensuous and emotional life-worlds in Atlantic Canada during the Second World War. Dr. Lorenzkowski served as the Lead Co-Director of COHDS between 2023 and 2026.

Find the project abstracts on the COHDS website.