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Muskrat Falls

Memorial professors tackle hydroelectric project in new collection

Campus and Community

By Randy Drover

Helmed by associate professors Dr. Stephen Crocker, Department of Sociology, and Lisa Moore, Department of English, Muskrat Falls: How a Mega Dam Became a Predatory Formation offers a multi-dimensional analysis of the social, political and environmental problems produced by the mega project.

For more than a decade now, the $13 billion Muskrat Falls hydroelectric dam has been generating a never-ending assemblage of crises in the public life of Newfoundland and Labrador.

A collection of works on Muskrat Falls, edited by two Memorial University faculty
Photo: Submitted

In a new collection, a wealth of interdisciplinary voices come together to investigate topics ranging from Indigenous resistance to the dam, the role of journalism and social media, and the science and politics of methylmercury and geophysical stability.

Muskrat Falls compiles research, scholarly essays, interviews, original artwork, photographs and a short story, all impelled by the mega dam, and brings together contributions from engineers, public critics, journalists, artists and academics, including Memorial’s Trevor Bell, Department of Geography, Jennifer Dyer, Department of Gender Studies, James Feehan, Department of Economics, and Robin Whitaker, Department of Anthropology.

The collection saw its inception at a 2018 symposium hosted by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Memorial University, which bought together scholarship, ideas and art to address the history, development and criticism of Muskrat Falls.

Muskrat Falls: How a Mega Dam Became a Predatory Formation is published by Memorial University Press.

 The editors

Stephen Crocker specializes in social and political theory, media studies, and Newfoundland society and culture. He is the author of Bergson and the Metaphysics of Media (Palgrave 2013) and of numerous essays and works in social theory and Newfoundland culture.

Lisa Moore has written three collections of short stories, Degrees of Nakedness, Open, and Something for Everyone; three novels, Alligator, February, and Caught; a stage play; and a young adult novel, Flannery. A new novel, This is How We Love, is forthcoming in May 2022. Moore teaches creative writing.


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