Critical Water Geographies: From Histories to Affect (original) (raw)
Related papers
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...
Exploring Political Ecologies of Water and Development
2013
This theme issue draws on political ecology scholarship to explore how hydrosocial relations are produced and transformed through development interventions that provide and manage water in the Global South. In the five papers that draw insights from different contexts globally, the authors examine historical and contemporary water-related development interventions to show how power is produced through water in ways that perpetuate, or even exacerbate, inequality, exclusion, and impoverishment. In doing so, the authors contest a set of important yet taken-for-granted narratives around water provision in international development. The broader ambition of the theme issue is to direct research on water-related development interventions in the Global South in new and productive ways, by showing how water and power relations intersect to shape differential access and outcomes among diverse social groups, to configure particular discourses around water management, and to produce uneven waterscapes ). Thus, the theme issue contributes to wider theorisations of water and power, and advances the understanding of the socionatural hybridity of water, whereby flows of water are not external to power relations, but intricately enmeshed in, and reflective of, them .
2021
Water is essential to human and living beings both for its physical and non-physical forms that enable humans to function. This book broadens discussions about water, from its physical dimensions and its use to beyond-physical ontological forms of water. The authors show that water is situated as a crucial part of social, cultural, and spiritual beings. Departing from the ontological pluralism of water, water has become more contested, not only as a commodity that is inseparable from the well-functioning of human lives but also as part of the living ecosystem. This book, not only deepens such frames of analysis but also advances recent debates around water bodies/ rivers/ oceans as having a right in and of itself as part of the multispecies living being in a shared space of planet Earth. Further, this book contributes to re-centering water as a fundamental environmental justice issue. This book contributes to the debates around the recognition aspects of justice, which makes claims for acknowledgement of different sets of values and cultural practices underlying valuation of water, which are often dominated by materialistic values. As Linton suggests on page 63 'No amount of citizen participation, social learning or stakeholder involvement in decision making process is likely to resolve the problem of different waters realised through different practices… without recognition of different political ontologies." This book provides a structured means for not only responding to the political and social problems in realising the right to water, but also its meta-political representation (formation of its very framings) (Fraser, 2009), of which we are allowed to claim for justice. Water Politics: Governance, Justice and the Rights to Water asks "how far have we made progress in realising [the] right to water? And under what frames are these policies and practices operating?". This book discusses a broad range of topics from the politics of water and water governance, human rights to water, and engages with water through the capabilities framework, addressing key issues around the water-food security nexus, water justice, and the intersectionality of water in varied contexts of the Global South and Global North, bridging urban and rural areas. The book highlights the evolving political ontologies of and about water across temporal, spatial, and governing scales, and how interpretations of such plural conceptions have been realised so far. The editors compiled various papers highlighting the progress that has been made in delivering and claiming rights to water across geographical-spatial contexts in the past three decades. The authors adopt a critical geography approach to water, and each of the fourteen articles present deep observations and critical analysis of empirical cases. While Linton's contribution in particular, entitled 'The rights to bring waters into being', engaging in a more theoretical debate on contesting the dominant political ontology of water in a globalised capitalist society and its brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
2017
This issue of the WATERLAT-GOBACIT Network Working Papers includes six contributions. The first article, by Mark Drakeford, presents a historical analysis of the changing arrangements for the provision of essential water and sanitation services in Wales. The second article, by Ross Beveridge, discusses the troubled process that characterized the privatization of Berlin’s Water Company (BWB) in 1999, in the aftermath of the reunification of Germany. In the third article, Emmanuel Akpabio, Eti-ido Udofia, and Kaoru Takara discuss some aspects of the interrelations between people and water in the context of sub-Saharan Africa. The fourth article, by Melina Tobias, Damiano Tagliavini, and Melisa Orta, addresses the current global wave of re-publicization of formerly privatized water and sanitation companies, looking at the experiences of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe in Argentina. In the fifth article, Barbara Casciarri and Mauro Van Aken discuss the significance and potentiality of "water" as an anthropological object of study. They place emphasis on the the fact that, despite water's key role in social and cultural relations, it has been mainly studied by the natural sciences, while anthropology has failed so far to recognize the value of water as an object of study. They suggest newly emerging perspectives for research on the subject. This article was originally published in French as an Introduction to an special issue on the anthropology of water in the Journal des Antropologues. The article by Casciarri and Van Aken was translated by Luisa Arango and Jorge Rowlands, who also provide and introduction to meta-studies of water-related research carried out by French and British anthropologists. The sixth and final article, by Ladislau Dowbor and Arlindo Esteves Rodrigues, focuses on the contradictions characterizing the conceptualization of water by different social actors, in particular the contradictions between market-driven notions of water as a commodity and civil-society understandings of water as a common good. The six articles composing this edition, from authors based in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, provide important contributions to current debates about the politics of essential water-related services. They also offer important insights about new avenues for research on water issues, aiming to enhance our knowledge of both empirical experiences and academic traditions that often remain isolated from each other whether because of geographical, national or cultural obstacles and distances.
Geoforum, 2011
This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature-society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of 'resource struggles' and 'resource conflicts' are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonlyused terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.
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.
Waterscape: a perspective for understanding the contested geography of water
The waterscape is a perspective that has captured the imagination of diverse scholars interested in the interaction of water and society. This includes the way water travels in time and space and is shaped by culture and geography. In this article, we pay particular attention to the study of the waterscape in the political ecology tradition. Scholars following this tradition have placed strong emphasis on understanding the role of power and the contested nature of water in diverse rural, urban, and periurban landscapes. The article provides a brief account of the main strands of literature and serves the purpose of an introductory overview of the waterscape for beginners. We focus both on major works that have helped define the waterscape as a perspective in political ecology and recent studies on the role of unequal power and gender relationships, informal water practices, and local water flows such as ponds and wastewater.
Just as space, territory and society can be socially and politically co-constructed, so can water, and thus the construction of hydraulic infrastructures can be mobilised by politicians to consolidate their grip on power while nurturing their own vision of what the nation is or should become. This book delves into the complex and often hidden connection between water, technological advancement and the nation-state, addressing two major questions. First, the arguments deployed consider how water as a resource can be ideologically constructed, imagined and framed to create and reinforce a national identity, and secondly, how the idea of a nation-state can and is materially co-constituted out of the material infrastructure through which water is harnessed and channelled. The book consists of 13 theoretical and empirical interdisciplinary chapters covering four continents. The case studies cover a diverse range of geographical areas and countries, including China, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Nepal and Thailand, and together illustrate that the meaning and rationale behind water infrastructures goes well beyond the control and regulation of water resources, as it becomes central in the unfolding of power dynamics across time and space.
“Hydro-dependency: The Culture of Extreme Water in World Literature”
[This is a pre-print draft of an article to appear in a special issue on “Dependencies” of New Formations, edited by Claire Westall, Joe Jackson, and Michael Gardiner. Please do not cite with requesting permission.] In this essay I wish to examine ‘hydro-dependency’ in the neoliberal era, exploring the cultural patterning and representations corresponding to the socio-ecological relations organizing the extraction, production, and consumption of water both as commodity and as energy in the neoliberal regime of the capitalist world-ecology. I will investigate how the specific infrastructures of riparian water management and hydropower - the pipeline and the dam - are mediated in world-literary hydropoetry and hydrofiction and the ways in which they are depicted as producing path-dependence and asymmetric distribution. However, I will also demonstrate how texts resist the moralizing language of dependency and instead reconceive water in terms of interdependence and hydrosocial interrelation, thus countering the hegemonic discourses through which flowing water is transformed into exchangeable, quantifiable commodities or forms of energy. In these, the contradictions facing the appropriation strategies of ‘cheap water’ and ‘extreme water’ are imagined not just in terms of pathologized social addiction or exhaustion of particular technics of water management, but as opportunities for resistance and transformation.
Water Regimes Questioned from the ‘Global South’ : Agents, Practices And Knowledge
2016
This working paper presents the proceedings of an international workshop on water policies, held on January 2016 in (Delhi) and brought together 25 participants. It was supported by a number of partners (Centre for Policy Research, Centre de Sciences Humaines, Institut Francais of Pondicherry, UMI i-GLOBES CNRS/University of Arizona, ANR ENGIND, ANR BLUEGRASS, Indo French Water Network et Institut de recherche pour le Developpement). The research focused on comparisons between different case studies in a range of countries (USA, Kenya, South Africa, Morocco, Mexico, France and India), adopting an approach situated at the crossroads of geography and sociology. This international dimension proves particularly appropriate for a study of ‘water regimes’ as is consubstantial to their development: beyond the models often identified as “national’, from the 19th century onwards, we can identify rationales of transfer involving knowledge, expertise, skills and trained agents. From the beginn...