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Paper short abstract:

Care for, and with, water reveals multiple present tenses in Jerusalem. Pasts and futures wield immediate action, so that beyond a temporal condition, the present is saturated with affective spectres and returns. I explore their effects, and the challenges in representation that they provoke.

Paper long abstract:

If time is not linear, what happens to the present? This question resonates in the daily encounters with water across its infrastructure in the city of Jerusalem. Care for, and with, water – the focus of my doctoral research – opens up the multiple tenses, and tensions, that the present brings about in this urban landscape. Pasts and futures emerge here precisely because of their immediate action. Futures impose on the now, returns to the past take visceral urgency, and historical moments of rupture are ever continuous. They make the present less a temporal condition – as it loops, folds, or collapses all together – but into an affective, bodily one. This lives in an obsession with ‘real-time’ water quality data, which elicits a particular affective affordance amongst the scientists who use it, to monitor potential contamination across the water network. It exists in the dynamic, intimate, and sensorial memories which accompany the repetition and return to age-old practices at a spring, or a small plot of land, in Silwan, East Jerusalem. It lives in the ‘everyday Nakba’ experienced by Palestinian Jerusalemites across the city, which carves out daily choices and larger refusals. I have confronted the challenge of these presents in the writing of my thesis. What does it take to ethically represent these continual loops, and their enduring effects, when writing of research encounters now past? Does the concept of ‘representation’ undermine this intention from the start? How could it be challenged in turn?