The Moore Family Fellowship in The Making of the American Landscape
School: PhD candidate in Design, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Dammed Landscapes: Decolonizing Infrastructure along the Mississippi River

Stokes seeks to understand Lock and Dam 1 as a site that both produces sociocultural conditions and is produced by its sociocultural context. Stokes’s study of river infrastructure will investigate the spatial qualities, infrastructural conditions, and local policies that relate to native people’s access to the Mississippi River, leading to a suggestion of shifts in design strategies and governance tactics around a case study lock and dam site.

Research hopes to answer how the knowledge of native people, who have historically been disenfranchised by locks and dams, might contribute to a new vision for river infrastructure in the future.