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- Convenors:
-
Helen Underhill
(Newcastle University)
Ruth Sylvester (University of Leeds)
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Short Abstract:
This panel will explore how anthropological knowledge helps us to work towards equitable futures in relation to accessing basic services such as clean drinking water and safe sanitation.
Long Abstract:
As we renegotiate our consumption on individual, community, and planetary scales in response to climate and ecological crises, we must increasingly ask questions of sufficiency, equitable distribution, who is granted access to the 'basics' of life, such as clean drinking water and safe sanitation services, and on what terms.
Engaging with the alternative ways that people access, store, use, think and feel about water offers a route to more nuanced understandings of what 'water security' means to marginalised groups and individuals, and helps to establish their ownership of just solutions.
Stemming from the convenors' ongoing research with itinerant boat dwellers in England & Wales, which develops the concept of vulnerability to water insecurity in the Global North, this panel invites reflections on:
• Roles, rights, and responsibilities in relation to water and sanitation services.
• How water and sanitation contribute to, or obstruct, 'wellness' in the broadest sense, for individuals, communities, societies and ecosystems.
• Links between levels of service and vulnerability/informal dwelling.
• How water and sanitation impact both urban and rural futures and possibilities.
• Studies of individual and collective agency and self-provisioning.
• The challenges and successes of developing participatory methods for community consultation on these often intimate and sometimes sensitive issues.
Our aim is to explore how anthropological knowledge helps us to work towards equitable futures in relation to accessing basic services.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 12 April, 2023, -Sophie Haines (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper relates vernacular interpretations of ‘watersheds’ in Belize to water/land practices, focusing on negotiations of water quality, biodiversity, wellbeing and contamination in community conservation projects, and related claims about expertise, responsibility, and environmental health.
Paper long abstract:
What values, politics and interdependencies come into view and/or into being alongside diverse forms of watershed thinking in rural Belize? Drawing on ethnographic research in and of 3 Belizean watersheds (encompassing Maya, Mestizo and Creole rural communities, municipalities, farmlands, protected forests, and national planning initiatives), this paper considers different ways of knowing, sensing, and living near water. Watersheds can be variously interpreted as modelled/mapped hydrogeographical areas; resource management units; riparian buffer zones or more extensive landscapes; mosaics/nested areas; veins or infrastructures circulating life forces, resources, and toxic contaminants; ways to connect biodiversity conservation efforts from ‘ridge to reef’; seats of tzuul’taq’a – Maya lords of valleys and mountains. What do these diverse understandings mean and entail for human-environment relationships, and questions of social justice? At a time when governments and international agencies are promoting water governance at catchment level, watershed ideas can precipitate, support or constrain different kinds of claims. In this paper I focus on how they refract causes relating to environmental health, as community groups wrangle biodiversity conservation/tourism initiatives towards consideration of potable water provision, contamination, and toxicity. What relationships do they forge or cut across (non)contiguous territories? How might the notion of a ‘body hydrologic’ help bring together considerations of environmental and human health that accounts for plural ways of knowing and living in and with waterscapes forged through such interacting elements and forces as gravity, rock, plastic, love, capitalism, respect and science; and their mutual implications with reckonings of expertise, public goods and responsibility?
Amber Abrams (University of Cape Town) Joshua Cohen (University of Leeds)
Paper short abstract:
Through arts-based and experiential/embodied research methods, relations with water can emerge; emergence of a diversity of relations around water can provide space for more just environmental engagements.
Paper long abstract:
Many social scientists highlight the inherently relational aspects of water, challenging us to reimagine the ways in which water governance, access, interventions and knowledges are approached, especially when developing policy and influencing practice. Central to these works is the importance of relationships that develop around water, and how, all too often, this is ignored in policy making or technological ‘solutions’ surrounding water concerns. This paper outlines varied methods and practices we have undertaken to explore relations and practices around water that center the body, expression and wellbeing. These methods work to understand the different ways in which people make use of, value and innovate around water, often shedding light on some social networks employed in accessing water, as well as those developing in relation to water sources. Our methods work to reposition every-day citizens’ understandings of water values and evaluations, adding diversity to contemporary debates and theorizations regarding the conformation of environmental subjectivities and the articulation of diverse forms of knowledge and expertise in an era of climate change-driven uncertainty. We suggest that methods focused on embodied experience and artistic cooperation can tell different kinds of human-water stories. These methods we suggest create space for reflecting on and engaging with other ways of relating to water, with potential for more just environmental engagements that consider diverse water knowledges, aside from those imposed by technocrats, decision-makers, and policy implementers. We provide case studies where our efforts have weathered numerous challenges, highlighting our shifts in practice and approach relevant to different contexts.
Ben Bowles (SOAS)
Paper short abstract:
Infrastructure finance and assurance (“infraspace”) is governed by its own logics and priorities. These do not reflect the needs and values of water and sanitation customers. This paper uses two examples (project finance procedures and the discourse of resilience) to explore this division.
Paper long abstract:
The provision of essential services such as water provision and sanitation in the UK reflects the competing power and logics of a number of actors. Customers have expectations and demands; financial actors and investors have their own logics and priorities; water companies have shareholders, financial backers, targets and forecasts to satisfy; and civil servants and regulators on the side of Government are governed by the bureaucratic process of infrastructure provision, assurance and regulation. Building on several years of ethnographic work on interdisciplinary projects, working with anthropologists and political economists in “infraspace” (Heslop), this paper takes two of the nodes in the System of Provision of water and sanitation as exemplars of a system that has disenfranchised water customers in favour of financial logics and the demands of the market. Firstly, the Thames Tideway Tunnel (London’s over-engineered “super sewer”) will be examined as a example of the ways in which expensive water mega-projects are built in order to satisfy the demands of investors for infrastructure projects as an asset class. It will be shown how this is detrimental for the communities who use the services, as it ties them into a long-term exploitative relationship with the providers of project finance. Secondly, the emergent logic of “resilience” in infrastructure assurance circles will be examined as an example of the ways in which consumers end up, through an apparently emancipatory language of consumer rights and priorities, paradoxically having to accept poorer and less reliable water and sanitation services.
Yuan Zhang (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examine the afterlives of the recent state-led 'Toilet Revolution' aiming to modernise rural toilets in China. I suggest how grassroot renovations of water infrastructures, focused on daily convenience and nature-based fluidity, challenge a linear demarcation between private and public.
Paper long abstract:
In 2015, the Chinese government launched a nation-wide 'Toilet Revolution' aiming at improving sanitary conditions of rural pit latrines all over China. Similar to other cases of water infrastructures in post-socialist context (Schwenkel 2015), the Toilet Revolution was preoccupied by the pursuit of hygiene and modernity. The Toilet Revolution, dating back to the early-twentieth-century pursuit of 'hygienic modernity' (Rogaski 2004), emphasises privatisation of human waste - that is, villagers should take responsibility of their own dirt.
Drawing on ethnographic research in Xuhao Village, Shanxi, North China from 2021 until 2023, this paper analyses an unexpected phenomenon rising in my field. Rather than using septic tanks and ceramic sitting toilets distributed by the local government, many villagers decided to put them aside or installed but never used them at all. Some villagers built their own indoor water pipes and sewage systems, allowing wastewater to flow underground to an abandoned well or to the edge of a cliff. As I argue, the gap between the state-led movement and grassroot reactions shows that the modernity-focused ideal has deviated from villagers' daily concerns. What mattered to the villagers was convenience in hygienic practices and fluid connections to earth and nature, instead of an abstract notion of hygiene and a clear boundary between private waste and public environment. These embodied, fluid construction practices need to be studied. My paper questions the dynamic of top-down transformations versus active grassroot reactions.
Ruth Sylvester (University of Leeds) Helen Underhill (Newcastle University)
Paper short abstract:
Canal boaters in England & Wales rely on water and sanitation services to enable healthy, fulfilled and expansive lives. People adapt around restricted services, a facet of life as water dwellers, but in some cases this impinges on human rights and damages individual and community wellbeing.
Paper long abstract:
Water and sanitation services on the waterways vary in quantity, reliability and accessibility throughout the national network. How canal boaters themselves interact with facilities and boat technologies is dependant on their individual agency, as well as on these external factors. Lived experiences reveal that different boaters do not receive equal benefit from the same service, creating misunderstandings in boater perceptions of one another and of navigation authorities. Inconsistent services are producing concern around public health, community relations and, for some, the ability to continue living on board. Responsibility is murky, as within the privatised water industry in England & Wales canal boaters are not considered water company customers. Therefore, their reliance and point of contact is with navigation authorities who have no legal obligation to provide a certain level of acceptable service. This leads to frustration and heightens other conflict occurring between boaters and authorities. Overall, wellbeing and equity are restricted on the waterways both due to the direct impact of water and sanitation on people's lives and the emotional distress and tension that is created in response. Social anthropological insights from this research can contribute towards the design of more equitable services and, in extension, a more 'well' society.
Joseph Cook (University College London) Caitlin Vinicombe (University of the Arts London) Nura Ali (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents a visual story of London’s boating community, examining how access to healthcare services being tied to a fixed address is an ongoing challenge for a diverse, eccentric, and growing urban population.
Paper long abstract:
In March 2023 ‘Navigating the System’ will become the second exhibition hosted at UCL Urban Room in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, East London. This paper will examine the research behind the exhibition and talk through some of the photos exhibited.
In the last decade, exacerbated by the ongoing housing crisis, the number of liveaboard boats across London has quintupled, now standing at over 2200. The majority of those individuals living afloat in the capital – ‘London Boaters’ – live a transient lifestyle, mandated to move location each fortnight. Despite residing within an urban centre, due to having 'no fixed address' challenges are often faced such as difficulty voting, claiming benefits and registering with GP services. On this final issue, with research showing that nearly four in ten (36%) of London's boaters having had problems registering with a GP due to a lack of address, and a further 30% have not even attempted to register. Those who are registered are on average 47km from their GP at any point in time.
In the summer of 2022, UCL Anthropologist Joseph Cook and Nura Ali from UCL DPU conducted interviews and surveys with a wide range of London’s boaters, understanding the human side of trying to gain access to healthcare in a world bound by catchment areas and postcodes. Portraits and home photographs were captured by young boater photographer Caitlin Vinicombe. This paper will examine urban health through the lens of transience, baselessness, and loophole-finding.