Center for Water Research

You are warmly invited to the Ninth Annual Symposium on Water in Israel, the Middle East, and Africa, hosted by the Northwestern Center for Water Research, Israel Innovation Project, and Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, in collaboration with the Institute for Policy Research. This year’s symposium features a panel discussion exploring “The Value of Experiential Data for Advancing Water Security.”

Panel details:
📅 Tuesday, May 13, 2025
🕔 5:00–6:30 PM
📍 Ford Design Center, ITW Auditorium (Room 1350)

All are welcome—faculty, students, professionals across disciplines, and members of the public engaged or interested in water research, policy, technology, and justice.

This in-person event features local and international experts discussing water innovation and collaboration. No registration needed—just join the conversation!

Please share with colleagues or students who may be interested. We look forward to seeing you there!

Yours Truly,
Aaron Packman & Sera Young
Co-Directors, Northwestern Center for Water Research

You’re invited to take part in the Student Water Jamboree—an exciting event dedicated to exploring how our work and interests intersect with water. Whether your research focuses directly on water, like wastewater resource recovery, or more indirectly, like the hydration of structural materials, water likely plays a bigger role than you think!

This is a great opportunity to share ideas, connect with peers, and reflect on the many ways water impacts our field.

Date: Friday, May 22nd

Location & Time:
Formal Programming: TBD, 2:00-4:00 pm
Lakefront Water Activities: NU Sailing Center, 4:15-6:30 pm

Please register using this form by May 15th.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Interdisciplinary event united faculty to tackle water challenges and sustainability. Read more in Brian Sandalow’s piece here.

The Earth and Planetary Sciences Department are happy to announce that Dr. Frank Corsetti (Chair and Professor of Earth Science at USC) will be presenting his talk Hanging around Hot Springs to Gain Insight into Life on Early Earth, or “Dear Reviewer 2, I am Aware the Proterozoic Ocean Was Not a Hot Spring”. 

Abstract
The engineers who manage Mexico City’s vast combined sewer and drainage infrastructures are constantly improvising new ways to cajole water to flow through the crumbling system even as the city sinks due to anthropogenic land subsidence. Their labor to maintain the system amid decades of deferred maintenance and adapt to rapidly changing environmental conditions might be seen as positive acts of care for the present and future. And yet these engineers instead understand their work as a necessary but inadequate response to a condition of state abandonment, manifest in ever-insufficient budgets. Engineers find themselves today treading water in the shadow of fading modernist plans from a mid-20th century period when “solutions” to the city’s persistent flooding – however flawed we now understand them to be – were still imaginable. And their creative work to keep the city (if only every partially) above water makes the breakdown of the drainage system so ordinary that it ceases to galvanize political attention. Paradoxically, by keeping the system running just “well enough,” they make it possible for the government to continue to deny the budgets necessary for the restoration of the system, leading to ever more flooding for the poor. The talk suggests a critical rethinking of the political function of both maintenance and adaptation and asks what we might recover from the modernist dream amid the devastating conjuncture of austerity and anthropogenic environmental change.

Biography
Dean Chahim (PhD, Stanford University) is an anthropologist whose research and teaching broadly trace the interactions between political power, engineering, and the urban environment. Previously trained as an environmental engineer, his work asks both how unjust environmental conditions are produced and sustained through engineering and how engineering practice might be reconfigured to challenge injustice and design for radically different futures. His current book project takes up these concerns through the case of Mexico City’s vast and deeply unequal flood control system. Drawing on both ethnographic and archival research, the book shows how engineering becomes a mode not of mitigating, but governing disasters: of maintaining rule over populations living in increasingly hazardous environments. This project has been funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Prior to NYU, he taught at the University of Texas at El Paso and was a Fellow in the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University.

Find out more here