Community Research Workshop

Community Workshop @ Iowa, Fall 2028

More information forthcoming!

Waterways Community Workshop

Mystic Seaport Museum
May 8–9, 2026

This workshop fostered community-driven and historically informed initiatives on climate justice, centered on bodies of water and the lives they connect and sustain. Facilitated by Michelle Moon, Principal of Saltworks Interpretive Consulting, the workshop brought together a coalition of scholars, artists, teachers, tribal leaders, and community leaders already engaged in climate and water justice with two aims: to empower individuals and community organizations with new connections to help them build resilient models and expand their work in historically aware, collectively oriented, and water-centered ways; and to imagine new forms of world-building that redress the ongoing racial and environmental injustices of the past.

Participants of Waterways Community Workshop gathered outside on the Mystic Seaport Museum grounds.
Participants visited the Three Sisters Garden, developed by Lydia Downs in collaboration with the Pequot and Narragansett Tribal Nations. The project demonstrates traditional practices of growing corn, beans, and squash together.
Notecard pasted on window overlooking Mystic Seaport with names "Pequot" and "Missituck" written on it.
Participants looked out on the Mystic River, site of the 1637 Mystic massacre, where English settlers forcibly dispossessed the Pequot people of their ancestral homelands.
Participants of Waterways Community Workshop aboard a whaling boat, docked at Mystic Seaport.
Whaleboat rowing, led by Dr. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Demonstration Team Lead at the Mystic Seaport Museum and Professor in English and Maritime Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Participants: Michelle Moon, Saltworks Interpretive Consulting, Michael Bagley, SoundWaters, Dan Brayton, Middlebury College, Jason Oliver Chang, University of Connecticut, Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College, Elysa Engelman, Mystic Seaport Museum, Akeia de Barros Gomes, Edward W. Kane & Martha J. Wallace Center for Black History, Elizabeth Kaeser, Connecticut River Museum, Kyle Labe, University of Connecticut, Silvermoon Mars LaRose, Tomaquag Museum, Jason Mancini, CT Humanities, Steve Mentz, St. John's University, Valeria Ochoa, University of Connecticut, Maria Petrillo, Mystic Seaport Museum, Debapriya Sarkar, University of Connecticut, Ned Schaumberg, Williams College, Jen Shook, Grinnell College, Maisa Tisdale, Mary & Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community, Thomas Thurston, Yale University, and Sophia Zepeda, Williams College

Colored graphic of the Bear Garden in London with Thames.