Call for Abstracts: Water matters infringing the water-society divide through interdisciplinary engagement (original) (raw)
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Water
In light of recent calls for an increased commitment to interdisciplinary endeavors, this paper reflects on the implications of a critical geography of water that crosses social and natural sciences. Questions on how to best research the relationship between water and society have been raised both in the field of critical geographies of water and sociohydrology. Yet, there has been little crossover between these disciplinary perspectives. This, we argue, may be partly explained by the fact that interdisciplinary research is both advocated and antagonized. On the one hand, interdisciplinarity is argued to deliver more in terms of effectively informing policy processes and developing theoretical perspectives that can reform and regenerate knowledge. On the other hand, natural and social sciences are often presented as ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically incompatible. Drawing on our own research experience and expertise, this paper focuses on the multiple ways in whi...
Editorial: Water matters: agency, flows, and frictions
To say that water is crucial to life is axiomatic. It pervades daily life, manifests itself in a variety of spaces and forms, and is used in a multitude of ways. It also pervades geography's history as an academic discipline, whether through studies of hydrological processes, examinations of resource distribution, or conceptualisations of nature ^ culture relationships. Water's place in such theorising is not limited to recent explorations in political ecology and hybridity but extends back to Semple's 1911 account of water's ``role in shaping the history of specific societies'' (Ekers and Loftus, 2008, page 699). Geographers' engagement with water is diverse and disparate. Our aim in developing this theme issue is to showcase a diversity of ontological and epistemological approaches to understanding and examining water, bringing them together to highlight some of the directions future research on human ^water relations might take.
Social Water: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop
Christine Gilmore, Nicola Pritchard, Sarah Bennison, Will Wright, Hannah Boast, Emilija Lipovsek, George Holmes, Claire Chambers, Jonathan Finch, Niranjana Ramesh, Hetta Howes, Satya Savitzky
"Social Water: an Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop 25th October 2013, University of York Call for Papers – deadline 13th September Water sustains life, but how might it also be said to sustain communities? Social and cultural engagements with water have become a rapidly expanding research area, a development which has challenged and complicated the previously dominant technical–managerial view of water as a ‘natural resource’. There is a growing realisation that ecologically-responsible interactions with water can only come about through an understanding of how people experience, use and ‘think with’ water as a particular type of substance that lies somewhere between nature and culture. Veronica Strang proposes that: ‘Water’s diversity is [...] a key to its meanings’ (2005: 98). Water comes in many forms: it can be salty, fresh, flowing, frozen, or gaseous; it can be ‘blue’ or ‘green’ (Falkenmark 1997), grey, or ‘virtual’ (Allen 2011). Water might be understood as a materialisation of structures of social power (Swyngedouw 2004), a substance through whose movements we can trace histories of colonialism, underdevelopment and the flow of capital. It can be a space of leisure, sport, or hedonism, or a site of danger, the origin of disasters such as tsunamis or droughts. Perhaps crucially, thinking about water is inseparable from thinking about its opposite, land. This workshop takes water’s various forms as a provocation and invitation for postgraduates to present similarly diverse critical perspectives on water’s social meanings. It offers a unique opportunity for constructive interdisciplinary conversations on this emerging and vital subject. Topics to consider might include, but are not limited to: Water privatisation Water on film Water in ecocriticism and environmental studies Gendered engagements with water Water in religion, performance and ritual Waterscapes – the sea, rivers, coastlines, marshes Disasters and reconstruction Embodiment, memory and affect The day will feature a keynote speech by Dr Kimberley Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, and will conclude with a roundtable discussion led by Professor Graham Huggan of the School of English at the University of Leeds. This event is hosted by the White Rose Research Studentship Network on Hydropolitics: Community, Environment and Conflict in an Unevenly Developed World. It has been generously supported by the University of York Humanities Research Centre."
Socio-hydrology and hydrosocial analysis: toward dialogues across disciplines
In this study, we review the ways in which water has recently been conceptualized by both natural and social scientists as either hydro-social or socio-hydrological. We do this in order to discuss whether and how they can be compatible, in order to enable dialogue across disciplines that seek to address the ecological and social challenges related to the complex human/water interactions. Through our review, we document the emergence of these specific terminologies , identify how these terms—and the conceptualizations they represent—relate to each other, and suggest what opportunities there are for building further interdisciplinary approaches to understanding water and society. Specifically, we review the recent rise in socio-hydrology amongst natural scientists/hydrologists to put this in discussion with a much longer tradition in social sciences of seeing water as both natural and social. We identify what the paradigms are in both conceptualizations in order to assess what their respective focus is, and what they omit. Our purpose is not to judge competing claims. Rather we want to assess the knowledge claims made in both paradigms: what can we learn when we employ these different approaches, what different rationales for action do they suggest, and what scope exists for collaboration. We conclude that there is scope in combining both approaches without a need to antagonistically question their respective fundamental assumptions, and playing to the strengths of each: the rich case study narratives produced by hydrosocial research can be the basis for the conceptual and quantitative modeling of socio-hydrology.
Pipes and praxis: a methodological contribution to the urban political ecology of water
This article contributes to the urban political ecology of water through applied anthropological research methods and praxis. Drawing on two case studies in urban Sonora, Mexico, we contribute to critical studies of infrastructure by focusing on large infrastructural systems and decentralized alternatives to water and sanitation provisioning. We reflect on engaging with residents living on the marginal hillsides of two rapidly urbanizing desert cities using ethnographic methods. In the capital city of Hermosillo, Radonic emphasizes how collaborative reflection with barrio residents led her to reframe her analytical approach to water governance by recognizing informal water infrastructure as a statement of human resilience in the face of social inequality, resource scarcity, and material disrepair. In the border city of Nogales, Kelly-Richards reflects on the outcomes of conducting community-based participatory research with technical students and residents of an informally settled colonia around the construction of a composting toilet, while also investigating municipal government service provision efforts. Our article invites readers to view these infrastructure alternatives as ways to explore how applied anthropology can advance the emancipatory potential of urban political ecology through a collaborative investigation of uneven urbanization and basic service provisioning. We emphasize everyday situated relationships with infrastructure in informally organized neighborhoods. Using praxis to collectively investigate the complex and entangled relations between large piped water and sanitation projects and locally developed alternatives in under serviced areas, the two case studies reveal lessons learned and illuminate grounded research openings for social justice and environmental sustainability.
Political Ecology, 2022
Infrastructures and their roles and connections to and in territories and territorialization processes have increasingly become objects of study in political geography scholarship. In this contribution, we build on these emerging insights and advance them by further conceptually disentangling the agential role of infrastructure. We bring together the notions of territory, governmentality, imaginaries and subjectivities, to clarify how exactly hydraulic infrastructure acts to transform relations between space, people and materiality. We start by intro-ducing territorialization as a process of ‘ordering things’ in a certain space and time through different techniques of government. When then show how, at the base of such territorialization processes, are imaginaries that contain normative ideas about how space and socio-territorial relations should be ordered. Imaginaries are consequently materialized through hydraulic infrastructure through the inscription of morals, values and norms in infrastructure design, construction and operation. This set of materialities and relations embedded in infra-structure brings changes to the existing relations between space, water and people. In particular, we highlight the repercussions of infrastructure for how people understand and relate to each other, the environment, water, technology and space: in other words, how subjectivities change as an effect of hydraulic infrastructure constitution. Last, we show how infrastructure and the related hydrosocial territories that develop around it are a dynamic arena of contestation and transformation. We argue that socio-material fractures, emerging counter- imaginaries and the disruptive capacities of subjectivities constantly challenge the ‘fixes’ that infrastructures aim to inscribe in hydrosocial territories. Throughout the paper, we use empirical examples from recent research on hydraulic infrastructure and territorial transformations to ground the conceptual ideas.
2019
This special issue explores the materialities, (im)mobilities and meanings of dwelling on and with water by asking how is water experienced, narrated, and understood. Water’s physical qualities both afford mobility and create frictions, thus complicating the boundaries between moving and staying, while waterscapes are also full of political, socio-cultural, and metaphorical meanings. Dwelling on water presents a challenge to overwhelmingly sedentary states and their terra-centric logics, which compels us to further discuss water both in a phenomenological and a political manner. This special issue suggests avenues for studying dwelling on and with water by examining various practices of being on water with their related meanings (the liveaboard boating communities on inland waterways and surfers on the sea) as well as with(out) water in terms of water scarcity, thus underlining the need for an anthropology of water.
2021
This PhD project identifies the complex imbrications of political and environmental violence resulting in patterns of human bodies and remains washing up on the shores of three rivers. It seeks to demonstrate that, contrary to common abstractions and universalisations of water as empty and neutral, the materiality and fluvial processes of rivers are highly engineered and even weaponised. Part I, co-researched with colleague Stefanos Levidis (CRA), considers the Evros / Meriç / Maritsa river between Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria as a Fluvial Frontier weighted with riverine crossings and systematic illegal pushbacks at the border of the EU. Part II explores the condition of Fluvial Terror on the Cauca river in Colombia, where the dispossessions of local communities, through extractive processes, are further compounded by the obfuscation of paramilitary violence within the reservoir of the Hidroituango megadam. Part III reads the mobilisation of the confluence of the Wisła, Soła and Prze...
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 2014
When simulating social action in modeling efforts, as in socio-hydrology, an issue of obvious importance is how to ensure that social action by human agents is wellrepresented in the analysis and the model. Generally, human decision-making is either modeled on a yearly basis or lumped together as collective social structures. Both responses are problematic, as human decision-making is more complex and organizations are the result of human agency and cannot be used as explanatory forces. A way out of the dilemma of how to include human agency is to go to the largest societal and environmental clustering possible: society itself and climate, with time steps of years or decades. In the paper, another way out is developed: to face human agency squarely, and direct the modeling approach to the agency of individuals and couple this with the lowest appropriate hydrological level and time step. This approach is supported theoretically by the work of Bruno Latour, the French sociologist and philosopher. We discuss irrigation archaeology, as it is in this discipline that the issues of scale and explanatory force are well discussed. The issue is not just what scale to use: it is what scale matters. We argue that understanding the arrangements that permitted the management of irrigation over centuries requires modeling and understanding the small-scale, day-today operations and personal interactions upon which they were built. This effort, however, must be informed by the longer-term dynamics, as these provide the context within which human agency is acted out.
Socio-hydrology: A new science of people and water
2011
Dateline November 2010, Murrumbidgee River Basin, Australia: Irrigators are up in arms over proposed government plans to cut their water allocations and return flows back to the basin's rivers to support the environment and restore lost biodiversity. The Australian of November 04, 2010 reported on the community backlash, including the resort to 'book burning'to highlight their plight. Community backlash and 'book burning'notwithstanding, the reality is that this conflict had been brewing for decades.