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In this short essay, Bessire considers the necessity of developing a new language to talk about depletion of aquifers. He invites researchers to search for an "intimate language of depletion," that emphasizes the "slow, granular, irreverent" histories in which we are all participants of. Only in this way, according to Bessire, can we begin to take responsibility for our political present. Overall, this approach "accounts stratigraphically for blockages and flows andthe zones where they overlap. Such an aquiferous ethnography can attend to the patchy, vertical, and open‐ended layers of lives impossible to chart from surface appearances alone."

Pablo Aguilera

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In "Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City" Vera S. Candiani explores the multiple projects carried out by a colonial administration (and later independent Mexico) to remove water via a desagüe project that was "the vastest and most complex dessication effort in the Americas during the [colonial] period" (pg.3). Despite this the desagüe project failed spectacularly to protect Mexico City from periodic flooding, which still occurs today —though none of the pre-colonial lakes remain. This term is a useful shortcut to ponder (desired) water, where it belongs, and the messy belief of hydraulic control.
- Gabriela

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"Ponds," in Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ - Eleana Kim (2022)

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"Ponds," in Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ - Eleana Kim (2022)

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Multispecies Opportunity
The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) has created a "multispecies opportunity" (Tsing) that has preserved premodern agricultural rice systems that depend on water irrigated from mini reservoirs or ponds (dumbeong).

Negative Infrastructure
These are the "negative infrastructure" of the DMZ (not infrastructures in the modern sense) that the promise of "peace and prosperity" of the inter-Koren cooperation will make obsolete.

Emergent Ecologies
Dumbeong as "emergent ecologies" (Kirksey) of humans, water, and the microscopic and invertebrate life-forms that live within them. Grounds for "experimental encounters" that decenter hegemonic/anthropocentric narratives about peace common in South Korean politics

Attentiveness-Attunement
The value of the ponds in terms of biodiversity is produced "in relation to the attentiveness and attunement of humans who care about them" (84). In other words, they become valuable sites for biodiversity conservation/research through the practices of attention and care of local researchers

~Jaime Landinez A.

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HYDRAULIC CITY: WATER AND THE INFRASTRUCTURES OF CITIZENSHIP IN MUMBAI (NIKHIL ANAND)

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HYDRAULIC CITY: WATER AND THE INFRASTRUCTURES OF CITIZENSHIP IN MUMBAI (NIKHIL ANAND)

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https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/31718

How are water crises –along with other natural resource issues– being researched and written about today? What effects do infrastructure projects have on water provision that transcend physical metrics and goals? These two questions can be expanded to the provision, management, and enjoyment of natural resources besides water. Nihil Anand’s work in Mumbai, and the way he eloquently makes water both a poetical and social agent, using water leakages as metaphors to explain water distribution and use in a city where water is sometimes sewage, sometimes a business opportunity, and sometimes a health risk and a source of miracles.

Neoliberalism's promise of a free and continuous flow of people, things, and ideas clearly does not apply to natural resources in our modern world and becomes particularly complex when it comes to the free flow of water. In Mumbai, just like in many other megacities around the world, water punctuates the rhythm, scale, and time of its citizens. Water distribution and management is timed and permeates everything from industrial activities to the time of day when kids can shower to go to school. In Mumbai, access to water services is reflective and productive of the relationship its citizens maintain with state institutions, and the administration of this vital resource has become a mode of rule.

María Villalpando

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OAPEN is based in the Netherlands, with its registered office in the National Library in The Hague. Director: Niels Stern Address:OAPEN FoundationPrins Willem-Alexanderhof 52595 BE The Hague Postal address:OAPEN FoundationP.O. Box 904072509 LK The Hague Websites:OAPEN Home: www.oapen.org OAPEN Library: library.oapen.org DOAB: www.doabooks.org

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In their book “Capitalism and the Sea’, Campling and Colas propose to challenge the terracentric understandings of capitalism and engage with the amphibious life of capital. According to the authors, capital as a value relation and as an imperative of value accumulation faces a “terraqueous predicament”: it has always had to contend with the geographical separation between land and sea that it permanently seeks to transcend and rearrange in its own benefit. For the authors, the critique of terracentrism should not be replaced with a focus on 'aquamobility', where water would be the solely dynamic center of capitalist relations, but with a focus on the terraqueous territorialities of capital. That is, a focus on how the laws of capital reproduction produce and are shaped by different land-water environments and place-based amphibious relations. I read the contributions by these maritime historian and political economists as an invitation to think about the territorialities of capital as a power-saturated relation between land and water in the sea and beyond, and inversely, to think about the ontological undoing of the land-water divide as one mediated by value relations.

Alejandro Garcia

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Kristina Lyons refers to river's memory "to its capacity to remember the courses of its currents, the expanse and heights of its beds,and the areas that itseasonally occupies and may have previously occupied".  Referring to one of the most destructive avalanches that have occurred in recent decades in Colombia affecting Moca City, she wonders: What forms of human settlement are adept and responsive to the conditions of living in the territories of rivers?

She suggests understanding the destruction caused by the avalanche as the materialization of the river's memory. This way of framing the problem allows you to question how the reconstruction of a city and the framings of victimhood and restitution are addressed .

Alejandra Osejo

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City   Society - 2018 - Lyons - Rivers have memory  The  im possibility of floods and histories of urban de‐and‐

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Water Justices (Boelens et al., 2018) Waterscape and Abject Water

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Water Justices (Boelens et al., 2018) Waterscape and Abject Water

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Waterscapes:

The waterscapes are spaces, imaginary and real, promised and inhabited, that define the symbolic and material power of water governmentality over social groups and the liquid world. Waterscapes might be canals, urban watersheds, dams, drainage systems, ports, water reservoirs, natural parks, and renders representing the desired image of a city. They express the intricate power assemblages that shape different cultures, aesthetics, discourses, and their relations with water and fluidity.

Abject water:

Water is not equal for every human being when observing the social processes through which many people are abjected from water. Water is differential: captured, allocated, controlled, commodified, and represented; and abjected: not granted and sometimes toxic, distant, and illegal. Abject water is a concept that allows us to think about “disproportionate challenges in accessing water supply and sanitary services” (Nauges 2013). Abjection “designates unlivable, uninhabitable zones of social life which are nonetheless densely populated by those who are not enjoying the status of subject but whose living, under the sign of unlivable, is required to circumscribe the domain of subject”(Murphy 2006, 152). Abjection is, I suggest, an appropriate term to describe informal settlements in general and their water and sanitation access”. (Crow 2018, 93).

I also chose the Cambridge edition on Water Justice by Boelens et al (2018) but chose different analytic concepts from two chapters.  “Urban Water and Sanitation Injustice: An Analytic Framework” by Ben Crow and “…”And Not a Single Injustice Remains”: Hydro-Territorial Colonization and Techno-Political Transformations in Spain” by Erik Swyngedouw and Rutger Boelens.

Crow’s chapter conceptualizes water from the experience of marginalized women facing sanitizing injustice. The chapter shows how the lacks of water access and sanitation amplify burdens on women in domestic and working environments, reinforcing structures that protect the patriarchy. It is a chapter, perhaps, intended for public policy. The chapter is a bibliographic review to analyze unequal structures affecting how different social groups relate to water.

Swyngedouw and Rutger Boelens describe in a very Marxian manner the metabolic relations between humans, places, capital, and water. This is a rich chapter to understand keywords such as hydro-social cycles and waterscapes. This chapter explains some concepts of water justice. It is a bibliographic review and a discursive analysis of politicians and technocrats that worked to modernize the waters of Spain to "develop" the country. There is a lot of information from governmental institutions, and quotes from people that worked as engineers or planners.

José Londoño

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Naveeda Khan argues that paradox, other than risk, danger, or fear, is privileged, experienced, and inflected within the watery environments and riverine lives in the Jamuna River (Bangladesh). Based on Carlo Severi, the author defines a paradox as "a logical link (…) established between two contradicting predicates" (2004: 820). However, moving away from the recent ontological turn and against the ongoing abstraction of water as a mere resource, the paradox is situated in the world rather than housed within individual thought or psyche. Thus, in coherence with the author's interest in Whitehead (and the early German Romantics), Khan argues that "to feel and remark on paradox is to note nature's working through the human" (182). In this vein, paradox allows her to theorize about the union of the mythological, the physical, and the social.

Fernando López Vega

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Photo: hybrid environments in Guania, Colombia.          

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Camargo y Camacho (2019). Convivir con el agua. Revista Colombiana de Antropología. ICANH.
Within their article, Camargo and Camacho (2019) compile different approaches through which water has been studied. One of them is related to habitats. The authors mention that the close relationship between land and water has allowed new theoretical and ethnographic possibilities to understand human and non-human life in humid environments. Hence, the authors take up the work done by Fals Borda, "based on his work in the floodplains of northern Colombia, Fals (1979) argued that amphibian culture includes a series of practices, beliefs, and ideologies around technology, environmental management, and the rules of agricultural and fishing production that allow survival between water and land". In the same way, Camargo and Camacho explain that analyzing life in wetlands involves understanding that it is challenging to establish limits between where the earth begins and ends. Thus, land property rights and water grabbing are at the center of the debate about the agrarian frontier expansion.

* Laura Castillo Ardila.

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Global and maritime historian Alison Bashford proposes the term “terraqueous history” to highlight the ways in which water does historical “connecting work,” serving as a meeting place and a medium of mobility. Terraqueous approaches to history consider the distinct spatiality and territoriality of water, challenging and complicating notions of dry land as fixed territory. Bashford’s terraqueous framework makes the case for considering the role of water at the intersection of the global and the local as well as thinking expansively beyond the land-water dichotomy to consider the role of wind, atmospheres, clouds, and ultimately, climate in social scientific research on water and society.

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Boelens, R , T. Perreault, & J. Vos (Eds.). 2018. Water justice (pp. 246–258). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ch. 1. Introduction: The Multiple Challenges and Layers of Water Justice Struggles. (Boelens, Vos and Perreault).

Water Justice is defined as “the interactive societal and academic endeavor to critically explore water knowledge production, allocation and governance and to combine struggles against water-based forms of material dispossession, cultural discrimination, political exclusion and ecological destruction, as rooted in particular contexts” (Boelens, 2015a: 34, quoted in Boelens et al. 2018: 22).

The authors stress the importance of power and politics from a relational, grounded, and historical perspective to analyze both explicit manifestations of water injustices and “more invisible norms and rules that present themselves as naturally or technically ordered.” (Boelens, et al. 2018: 2).

The book focuses on diverse cases of (overt and subtle) water justice struggles, in which ‘new competitors’ (e.g., megacities or extractivist industries) ‘demand and usurp’ water resources affecting marginalized urban and rural communities. These struggles are framed through what the authors call the “fourth echelons of right analysis” (Boelens et al. 2018: 20 and 349), corresponding to disputes: 1) related to access and use of water-related resources (considering also water infrastructures, and material and financial resources); 2) over the contents of rules and rights conditioning water distribution; 3) over the authority and legitimacy (who has the power to take decisions regarding those rights and rules); and 4) considering discourses (or the power-knowledge regimes that frame water problems and solutions).
- Evelyn Arriagada -

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Viewing water through the lens of (in)sufficiency, asks how it is that currently levels of supply can come to be, and what effects they might have on the populations making use of that water. Viewing water through the lens of ownership and commodification, we can lay bare the social hierarchies and corporate/state mechanisms leading to specific cultural outcomes. These lenses should be problematized though, through the interrogation of the presumption that water has a positive ethical valence and exploration of the socio-political and socio-economical causes and ramifications of available water supplies and observed water-based political economies.

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River as Geological Event and Hydrological Entity–Naveeda Khan

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River as Geological Event and Hydrological Entity–Naveeda Khan

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Khan, N. 2019. At Play With the Giants: Between the Patchy Anthropocene and Romantic Geology. Current Anthropology 60(20):333-341. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/702756

"During the 1950 Assam earthquake, entire mountains in the Himalayan range collapsed and fell into the Dihang/Brahmaputra River... the sediment produced of that collapse clogged the river, requiring its expansion, change of course, and merger with another, previously small, river to clear a massive passageway for the sediment to flow downstream into the Bay of Bengal. In other words, the river was the product of an earthquake that changed the course of an older river, enabling it to discharge the sediment built up as a consequence of the earthquake" (p.336).

This brief article has a whole bunch of weird things to say about something called "romantic geology", but what I appreciate about it is how it shows that form is a relationship. It reminds me that water can be heated to over 100°C without turning into steam, provided it is under high pressure; form is not a given, nor just a process, but is like an outcome between forces in tension with one another. It helps me to imagine space as an event, rather than only time.

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Each framework provides a conceptual understanding and an opportunity to be politically engaged with these movements via analytical questions. I find the river-as-subject framing particularly useful. Moreover, through ethnographic tracing, I hope to elucidate the limitations of framing "disagreements over incompatible ontologies" (p. 22) as the underlying conflict in the emergence of rivers as subjects of rights. Together, the four framings help us account for material and political reconfigurations related to rivers. Very useful to play with and place the theoretical framings in conversation with empirical data.

-dama

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Boelens et al. (2022) Riverhood political ecologies of socionature commoning and translocal struggles for water justice

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In this piece, 29 scholars reflect on how social movements struggling for water justice open up a series of fields to radically transform cultural, scientific, and institutional engagements with water throughout the world. They craft a four-fold ontological framework that interrogates rivers as eco-society, as territory, as subject, and as movement.

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Boelens et al_Riverhood political ecologies of socionature commoning and translocal struggles for water justice

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Rutgerd Boelens, Jaime Hoogesteger, Erik Swyngedouw, Jeroen Vos & Philippus Wester (2016) Hydrosocial territories: a political ecology perspective, Water International,
41:1, 1-14, DOI: 10.1080/02508060.2016.1134898

The authors conceptualize a 'hydrosocial territory' as:

"the contested imaginary and socio-environmental materialization of a spatially bound multi-scalar network in which humans, water flows, ecological relations, hydraulic infrastructure, financial means, legal-administrative arrangements and cultural institutions and practices are interactively defined, aligned and mobilized through epistemological belief systems, political hierarchies and naturalizing discourses".

- Some other key insights from the paper:

"Water is thus simultaneously a physical and a social actant in cultural and political processes and can for instance “be and become a border, a resource for regeneration, a  foundation for empire, a means of nation building, and a material linkage between past and present” (Barnes & Alatout, 2012, p. 485)".

-"To argue that hydrosocial territories are ‘humanized nature’ or ‘socionatures’ is to insist that they are not fixed, bounded, and spatially coherent territorial entities. Rather,
it poses that territory and the processes of territorialization are – and should be examined as – spatially bound, subject-built, socionatural networks that are produced by actors who collaborate and compete around the definition, composition and ordering of this networked space (Rodriguez-de-Francisco & Boelens, 2016; Swyngedouw &
Williams, 2016; see also Agnew, 1994; Elden, 2010; Escobar, 2008)".

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Hydrosocial territories: a political ecology perspective

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We define and explore hydrosocial territories as spatial configurations of people, institutions, water flows, hydraulic technology and the biophysical environment that revolve around the control of...

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Chandler, Mielle, and Astrida Neimanis. 2013. “Water and Gestationality: What Flows beneath Ethics.” Thinking with Water, 61–83.

Gestationality is a notion that addresses water's capacity to defy binary logics for activity and passivity. Water is neither active nor passive, and yet both active and passive. Gestation provides material evidence of the integration of what logic separates. Whereas sovereign subjects recognize the agency of other already-existent sovereign subjects, a gestational orientation turns toward bringing into existence that which is “not yet". Gestationality thus challenges the dominant mode of being which we could call “sovereign ontology.” A gestational approach does not immediately lend itself to mutual recognition or exchange but is, rather, oriented toward providing the conditions for an unpredictable plurality to flourish.

~Alejandro PdL