Short Abstract

This workshop explores how water moves human and nonhuman lives across scales, how it shapes political struggles and competing visions of the future. We discuss methodological and conceptual engagements with the agency and material particularities of different waters in ethnographic research.

Long Abstract

Water shapes social and political life in ways that exceed human projects of control, containment and management. Anthropogenic climate change intensifies the volatility of aquatic environments through shifting rainfall patterns, droughts, floods, coastal erosion and changing ecological conditions. These transformations unfold unevenly, reshaping livelihoods, infrastructures and human–nonhuman relations while raising questions of authority, responsibility and the possibilities of inhabiting uncertain futures.



Taking water’s movements and agency as a starting point, this panel explores how aquatic environments shape human and nonhuman lives, imaginaries and political struggles across local, regional and planetary scales. Water can sustain livelihoods, facilitate mobility and exchange, and support biodiversity, while also disrupting settlements, undermining infrastructures and challenging established boundaries. Such ambivalences expose the limits of attempts to govern water through technical interventions, territorial borders, conservation policies and resource management. They also reveal how aquatic relations emerge from historical trajectories of unequal distributions of power.



We invite contributions that examine how humans and nonhumans move water, and how water, in turn, moves them materially, politically and affectively. We are particularly interested in ethnographic and conceptual engagements with the agency and material particularities of water, the historical entanglements of aquatic relations, and the ways these relations are negotiated amid competing visions of the future. How do water’s movements challenge established forms of authority and control? Who has a say in shaping future water worlds, and who is held responsible for their condition? How do struggles over water intersect with contestations over democratic participation, political exclusion and authoritarian promises?